In speaking with GamingBolt, Sean Tracy, the US engine business development manager for Crysis developer Crytek, shared his thoughts on how developers will find it difficult to cope with the amount of RAM that’s available on both the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4–which is to say 8Gb each.
During the interview, Tracy goes on to say that only having 8Gb of RAM available for each console will be easily filled up, even when a portion of the total RAM is set aside for the consoles’ respective operating system. He believes that, as time goes on, the computing requirements to run future titles will soon hit the ceiling cap of the RAM that’s provided for each console.
“ 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, ” Tracy told GamingBolt. “ Since technology, as Ray Kurweil [American author, futurist and inventor] 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, ” he added. “ 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. ”
It’s probably unlikely that both consoles will receive an upgrade to their RAM (as they’re pretty much sealed cases with no interchangeability), but 8Gb is a heck of a lot more than the 512Mb the previous two iterations had. Will developers max out 8Gb over time? Of course they will. Is it something to be worried about? Supposedly, in as much as trying to figure out how to make the most out of little as possible–something the previous generation did quite well in my humble opinion.
[ GamingBolt ]