14 DAY TRIAL // Both Sony's PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's Xbox One have plenty of memory, or at least the listed specs so claim. In practice though, not all of it can actually be used by games, and it may turn out to be the systems' pitfall.
The leap from the previous generation's 512 MB to this one's 8 GB is a considerable one indeed, but for now it doesn't necessarily mean that developers have sprawling memory estate for their games.
Both next-gen consoles' operating systems come with a rather large overhead that takes a substantial toll on memory. The same issue was reported when the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 were released.
Over time though, more and more tweaks and optimizations were made to their OS, gradually offering developers more memory to work with.
A similar cycle is expected for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, with both Sony and Microsoft improving on their systems over the next couple of years. With games becoming ever more complex, the resource requirements of modern productions will truly put the new systems to the test.
As industry insider Ashan Rasheed reported on Twitter, there already are games in development for the PlayStation 4 that use as much as 6 GB of RAM.
He further stated that when asking a developer what the biggest bottleneck for the PS4/Xbox One is, the response was “Memory. Not CUs, ALUs, ROPs, TF counts, CPU cores – nope none of that. Memory. M-E-M-O-R-Y.”
It seems plausible that the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One might start facing some shortcomings in the future if this issue turns out to impede development, but Sony or Microsoft will likely address such matters should they turn out to be such a decisive factor.