“Competitive intelligence suggested that we needed to be flexible on the amount of memory,†said Greg Gibson.
The game developers wanted more. The average amount of main memory in a PC was rising. They argued that Microsoft had scrimped in other ways, making the hard disk drive optional and including a DVD drive instead of an HD DVD or Blu-ray drive. Tim Sweeney, the graphics wizard at Epic Games, lobbied hard. He created a series of screen shots for what Epic’s game, Gears of War, would look like with 256 megabytes of memory, and what it would look like with 512 megabytes. Clearly, the 512-megabyte solution looked far better. With it, Epic could implement “high dynamic range†images. These were images that improved the realistic feel of games because they could show both low-light and bright-light images in the same picture. The effect could create images such as the rays of the sun shining through some dark clouds.
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It was a $900 million decision. Microsoft would have to make arrangements with both Samsung and Infineon Technologies, two of the biggest memory-chip makers, to produce more GDDR3 chips. When the crew at Epic Games heard the decision, they hooted in celebration. But again, rather than spend more money over the life of the program, Microsoft decided to find cuts in other parts of the program. It scaled back some of its other plans in the spreadsheets, and then moved to make more decisions. Nobody knew it at the time, but by doubling the amount of memory, Microsoft had made one of the most fateful decisions on the entire Xbox 360 program.
Sony PS3 has 512MB of memory.
