Modern video games require a lot of memory not only to store things like textures or various graphics-related data, but also to store a lot of information about game levels and many other things. Not surprising that game developers praise Sony Corp. for installing 8GB of GDDR5 into the upcoming PlayStation 4 game console.
“As a level designer we are struggling against memory every day. We cut things, we remove things, we strip things, we split the levels, we remove NPCs from levels because there's not enough memory. So knowing that memory is something that is going to be improved in the next generation of consoles: to us, it is a joy. It is something that we were waiting for,” said Christophe Carrier, a lead level designer at Arkane Studios, who worked on Dishonored video game, in an interview with Eurogamer web-site.
Current-generation video-game consoles from Microsoft and Sony have 512MB of random access memory, a catastrophically insufficient amount by today’s standard. As a result of insufficient amount of memory, many games look and feel much better on the PC, where developers do not have to cut-down objects or levels in a bid to enable smooth frame rate. The majority of gaming PCs today have from 4GB to 8GB of memory. The next-generation game consoles will also feature 8GB of random access memory.
“We were PC gamers at the beginning. We love PC games, and we had to make games on consoles. But the main problem was memory. The processors are good, but the memory, for our games, is the most important. So [8GB] is great,” said Mr. Carrier.
Besides loads of memory, Sony PlayStation 4 platform offers a number of other innovations, such as heterogeneous multi-core AMD Fusion system-on-chip with eight x86 general-purpose cores as well as custom AMD Radeon HD graphics core with 1152 stream processors, Gaikai-powered social features and so on. It remains to be seen how and where will Arkane Studios utilize those advanced technologies.
“We are looking forward at how we can integrate all those things into our [next] game,” said Dinga Bakaba, Dishonored game designer and associate producer.
Tags: Sony, Playstation, Orbis, Durango, Xbox Next, Microsoft, Arkane
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Discussion started: 03/10/13 03:32:14 PM
Latest comment: 03/11/13 05:02:33 PM
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Current PC games run fine on 4GB's ... 8GB's is good to have just encase you run allot of other things on your PC in the background.
Ram is so cheap these days even GDDR5.. that if SONY or MS didn't at least have 8GB's it would have been starting off on a minimum ram amount all over again just like they did with PS3 and Xbox360
"fast" Ram did cost allot back on release of those machines
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Posted by: vid_ghost
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Date: 03/10/13 03:32:14 PM]
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Current PC games are also limited by what is released on the console side, as these guys aren't spending a lot of time developing assets that will only be used by a fraction of their target audience.
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Posted by: daneren2005
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Date: 03/11/13 05:02:33 PM]
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Agree, but remember that those 8GB of RAM are shared between CPU and GPU, so probably the game will take like 60-70% of RAM, and the rest is reserved for the OS and other stuff.
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Posted by: TAViX
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Date: 03/11/13 02:32:05 AM]
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