New rumour about PS4, might upset some people so beware!

[Anonymous]

A new rumor suggests that PlayStation 4 developers will be able to use less than 70% of PlayStation 4’s RAM for games.

While Sony’s new console will contain 8GB of DDR5 memory total, Digital Foundry reports that 3.5GB of that space is reserved for the operating system, leaving only 4.5GB available for games. Anonymous sources clarified to Digital Foundry that 1GB of the reserved RAM is available as “flexible memory” and “may be reclaimed from the OS reservation, based on availability,” making 5.5GB potentially accessible.

Internal Sony documents suggest that 4.5GB is the “baseline amount of guaranteed memory available” for games, but that the additional 1GB of “flexible memory” can be used by devs to “boost elements of the game” as long as the memory isn’t needed by PlayStation 4’s OS. PS4 dev kits currently contain a “Game Memory Budget Mode” that offers “normal” and “large” options, with normal allowing for 4.5GB of memory usage by games, while “large” boosts that number to 5.25GB.

For comparison’s sake, Digital Foundry points out that Xbox One will reserve 3GB of RAM for its operating system, and that both Xbox One and PS4 “allocate two Jaguar CPU cores to the operating system, and what sounds like a disproportionately higher level of RAM than one might expect.” This allocation will likely be used to allow the system to support features such as the live-swapping of games and applications that Sony showed off in its user interface demo in June.

For now PlayStation 4’s RAM allocation is unconfirmed, but we’ve reached out to Sony and will update this story with any comment or clarification we receive. Find out more about the PlayStation 4’s specs and features in our PlayStation 4 wiki guide.

[Thoughts?

[Anonymous]

This is a good site to visit for good information on this.

http://uk.ign.com/articles/2013/07/26/35gb-of-playstation-4-ram-reportedly-reserved-for-os

or here

http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/consoles/ps4-release-date-news-and-features-937822

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/game/3350902/ps4-release-date-specs-price-uk/

[sheepdog]

Its only upsetting to those who think stats and specs are important. This is nothing new. Linux/Unix server o/s's work in exactly the same way and use the disk as swap space if it runs out of physical memory. This PS4 is utilising RAM (in my opinion reading that) in a way that it avoids latency by reserving enough memory for other uses i.e. its needed for multi-tasking.

In a way, restriction of available memory might result in games that rely on gameplay rather than fancy graphics. See 8bit games for what could be done in 48K of RAM and the ingenuity of the time. 

Besides, if you want to do a bit of background reading on why you don't need a great deal of memory to multi-task if you've got multi-cores, take a look at this:  http://www.parallella.org/board/ and see what its capable of in 1GB of RAM! 

[Anonymous]

I only put the warning in because I suspected that there may be hardcore Sony zealots reading who would get a bit upset that their next gen console is possibly of a lesser spec than its competiion from MS.