5th Gen:PS1: MainRam - 2MB
6th Gen: PS2: 32MB - 8x the N64 from 5th gen...
7th Gen: PS3: 512MB Total RAM - 8x the most in the 6th Gen...

2mb -> 32mb 8times
32mb -> 512mb 16times
______________________
8times -> 16times 2times bigger
so another 2times bigger from 16times would be 32times
512mb * 32 = 16gb

so if you really want to predict by previous advancements... next gen sony will have 16gb of ram. wow.

...... will the console come with 4 screens and allow you to play 4 different games at once? am guessing it will be able to hold 16 controllers at once, have a 8 disc changer, and alot of FireWire and USB 3.0 ports.... It must have 3 Cell processors clocked at 8GHz..... Will this cost me 1.4K????

AWESOME!!! LOL.

I want one!!!!

As I said, I know what ray tracing is, I spent a good deal of time with Pov-Ray some ten years ago. That's why I posed the question. And yes, it is possible to render real-time raytracing scenes, there have been demos of such systems for years already. The thing is, there's not a whole lot to gain from doing so, because ray tracing is really computational heavy stuff, and to get to real-time performance you have to sacrifice a lot of stuff that makes ray-tracing worthwhile to begin with. So, again, where is the point? Do we really need 99.9% photorealistic reflections, shadows, refractions, diffractions etc? I can think of several other things that should be using the processor cycles instead of ray-tracing in games.

I reckon it will be a lot more than 4GB. If Sony manage to get the 10 years or near 10 years out of this Gen, we won't be seeing the PS4 until maybe 2012 or thereabouts.

Seeing as the price of memory is getting cheaper and cheaper all the time, I reckon we will see a 8GB or even 16GB as you say 7th Gen console.

Although if MS release the 720 or what they will call it as I predict in 2 years time then I can't see it having more than 4GB.

I'm guessing that what you've heard is actually in relation to 32-bit memory addressing. To give you a breif summary, on a 32-bit system (the majority of PCs at the moment), the system is only able to address 2^32 bytes (4GB) of memory. This includes video ram and various other parts that need to be addressed. So if you have 4GB of ram, and a video card with 512meg, you'll only be able to see 3.5GB of your system ram at best because the video card also needs to be addressed. 64-bit systems do no have this issue as they are able to address 2^64 bytes (roughly 17 billion GBs) of ram.

This is not an issue for consoles (esp. as all current gen are at least 64-bit anyway) as they have custom architectures and support for more memory is just a matter of creating it with enough address space.

 You shouldn't have wasted your time.

Your analysis is flawed, rubbish, and skewed to give the results you wanted so you could make the post.

You have added the main memory + video memory for some consoles, and not for others...To suit your post for a "discussion"!!!

Why haven't you included the genersis\snes\nes?

Because it didn't fit your "trend" lol thats why....Back to school with you!

Your confusing density with frequency...

Your post basically equates to you telling me you 6 miles and hour tall.

I think memory scales further with process shrinks (in terms of density)...Frequency totally different story.

The issue here will be the speed of the memory, maybe...It depends on the architecture that they decide to use in the next consoles, it might be more PC based with a proper "graphics card" and not one unified thing with the bandwidth being shared...

You can pick up 8GB off DDR2 for less than a £100, but 8GB of GDDR3\4\5.....Big bucks!!!

considering I've already got 4gb ram on my computer right now... 4gb in a few years on consoles seems rather weak... but then again, maybe they'll start using boosters :)

I think it's a bit too early to say. I remember by the time PS3's specs were released, 1GB RAM was the standard in all of the mainstream PCs.

I'd be less surprised with a dual GPU solution for next gen than with more than 4GB RAM