We had a chance to speak founder and COO of Geomerics Chris Doran, whose company created Enlighten which is used for creating lighting for games like Battlefield 4 on the subject of – what else? – next generation consoles. Specifically, we compared the Xbox One’s 8 GB DDR3 RAM and the PlayStation 4’s 8 GB DDR5 RAM, with 5 GB and 7 GB allocated to games respectively, and asked Doran which is a better solution for crafting realistic lighting.
He stated that, “Both of these are more than sufficient. To understand why, you have to remember than on the current generation we had around 512MB of memory to play with. This meant that developers would routinely ask us to fit our global illumination calculations into 10-20MB.
“On the next-generation consoles, developers are happy to give us 10 times more space to play with – in some cases even more! And with 8 CPU cores and powerful GPUs, there is plenty of compute resource for us to make use of. It is this massive increase from current generation to next generation that really excites us – that factor of 10 increase is going to be far more significant than the additional memory on the PS4.
I’m sure as the cycle evolves, developers will look at ways to squeeze more out of the PS4, but we have a long way to go with exploiting the opportunities presented by the massive jump in resource over PS3 and 360.”
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