PS4’s 8 GB was hidden from third-party developers

It seems that third-party developers did not know that PlayStation 4 would be including 8GB of GDDR5 RAM until Sony’s reveal event in February – even though they already revieced development kits before the console was officially announced.

VideoGamer.com got a chance to talk to Just Add Water’s CEO Stewart Gilary – who is developing a unknown IP for PlayStation. Gilray stated that third-parties were originally told that console would only be equipped with 4GB of RAM. However, after they found out the real RAM specs after console’s reveal they were pleasantly surprised.

This is what Gilray had to say regarding this matter; “We were told [PS4] was 4GB originally,” Gilray told us, “and we first knew it had 8GBs when Mark said at the event’s stage, ‘And it has 8GB of memory.’ We’d had kits at that point for a good while.”

Gilray assumed that only “a couple of really close first-parties” knew that PS4 would have 8 GB before the console’s reveal, “but I think most third-parties, if not all third-parties were like, ‘Yeah, 4GB, awesome, can’t wait.

“It’s a fantastic amount of memory,” he goes on, “especially DDR5 memory, because it’s so fast you don’t have to have everything there at once. You can swap it in and out instantly, effectively. But when they said 8GB it was like, ‘Ooookay.'”

Gilray also said; “added bonus” of PS4’s memory is that Sony has “already ring-fenced the system memory away from the game memory,” Gilray adds, “so there’s none of this business that we had with PS3 of having to share memories.

“When you press the PlayStation button on a PS3 game, you get the basic XMB up [but] to do anything you have to quit the game, because of the memory for it. With PS4 we don’t have that because the system memory is already ring-fenced for itself.”

After hearing Gilray’s comments it is easily assumed that the third-party developers originally developed games that targeted lower system requirements than the actual console’s capabilities. This might just explain the reason why Thief will be capped at 30 FPS rather than 60.

PlayStation 4 is slated to come out this Holiday season worldwide. Stay tuned for more next-generation news here at GamingBolt.

Source – VideoGamer