While the PS4 and Xbox One wowed developers and consumers alike with their copious amounts of RAM – the PS4 more so since it sports 8 GB GDDR5 RAM in a unified architecture – it’s not as though it’ll be difficult to fill up. In fact, that time may come sooner than later according to Crytek’s US Engine Business Development Manager Sean Tracy.
We recently interviewed Havok’s head of product management Andrew Bowell about the 8 GB of RAM in both consoles and had been informed that artists will have no trouble occupying it all. Does Tracy also believe there will be a shortage of RAM in this generation as well?
“I would have to agree with the viewpoint that 8 gigs can easily be filled up, but also keep in mind that developers don’t necessarily even have access to all 8 gigs of it. For example the Xbox One retains some of the RAM for OS purposes. Since technology, as Ray Kurweil states, progresses exponentially, we will soon find that the computational requirements of games will quickly hit the ceiling of a few gigs of ram. We already had to manage quite intensely our memory usage throughout Ryse and this will be one of the limiting factors surely in this generation.
“As hardware gets stronger the complexity of scenes can be increased and the dynamism within them. However, with that said it’s not the raw power alone that will allow for photo-realistic graphics but technology that intelligently scales and utilizes all that the hardware has to offer.”
So again, it will come down to who best optimizes their games for the hardware that both the PS4 and Xbox One offer. It may be a few years till developers are confidently using all the power a system has to provide but it remains to be seen how they’ll go about achieving the same. What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments below.
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