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

The press release describes the GPU and the memory as:

PS4 is equipped with 8 GB of unified system memory, easing game creation and increasing the richness of content achievable on the platform.  GDDR5 is used for this memory, giving the system 176 GB/second of bandwidth and providing a further boost to graphics performance. The end result for gamers is new games with rich, high-fidelity graphics and deeply immersive experiences that shatter expectations.

The Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) has been enhanced in a number of ways, principally to allow for easier use of the GPU for general purpose computing (GPGPU) such as physics simulation.  The GPU contains a unified array of 18 compute units, which collectively generate 1.84 Teraflops of processing power that can freely be applied to graphics, simulation tasks, or some mixture of the two.

The complete specification is below:

Main Processor 
Single-chip custom processor
CPU :  x86-64 AMD “Jaguar”,  8 cores
GPU : 1.84 TFLOPS,  AMD next-generation Radeon™ based
graphics engine

Memory 
GDDR5 8GB

Hard Disk Drive 
Built-in

Optical Drive
(read only)
BD 6xCAV
DVD 8xCAV
I/O
Super-Speed USB (USB 3.0) 、AUX

Communication 
Ethernet (10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, 1000BASE-T)
IEEE 802.11 b/g/n
Bluetooth® 2.1 (EDR)

AV output 
HDMI
Analog-AV out
Digital Output (optical)

It is interesting to see the official specs are pretty close to what we reported a  week back. You can red that article over here. The only massive change is the RAM. Sony have learned their lessons and have put in a powerful 8GB GDDR5 RAM, which should make the system future proof for years.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below. Stay tuned to for our continuous coverage of the PlayStation 4.