Silent_Buddha
Legend
Trying to understand the justification, which I hope is better than, "heck, 5GBs is enough compared to last gen. Let's just put the rest aside and see what happens in a few years."
There's something like 2 GBs 'spare' RAM in the 8 GB configuration. It's RAM that's likely not going to be being accessed constantly whether it has game assets stores away there or background tasks or user applicaitons. Would it be better for games to allow precaching for 2 GBs games assets, like more megatexture tiles in complex city environments? Or better to keep resident 50 different utilities and social apps that the user can flip to the front in an instant? Different folk will have different preferences, but the justification for needing that much for apps somewhat confuses me. Even looking forwards I can't see where the change is going to come. We talked about this at length in the next gen tech thread, about Durango reserving 3 GBs, and it seemed a gig or more could be used for Kinect and stuff, rather than 'apps'. What future requires a console to do more than a current iPad? Is the web going to become less and less efficient and just become retina-quality images taking up a gig a page or something equally ridiculous?
WRT - Web pages. Would you be happy with mobile versions of websites on your large screen HDTV similar to a smartphone? Or would you rather have PC (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.) versions of web pages on your HDTV? Sure you can sometimes toggle to the full version of websites on a smartphone, but how many of those can you open up before the phones start to tombstone or evict tabs out of memory? While having other applications open? Without tombstoning or evicting those applications from memory? IIRC, iOS is fairly aggressive (compared to Android) at tombstoning and evicting apps/browser tabs from memory.
Would you rather to be limited to a single window with a single tab, or would you rather have the ability to open up multiple tabs?
Would you want to limit what can be displayed in the browser or would you rather have a fully web capable browser?
It's certainly possible to limit the user such that they only visit web pages that don't use much memory, but wouldn't it be better to just allow the user to potentially access any website they wish as long as it wasn't a site known for hosting malicious content (IE - meant to exploit 0-day vulnerabilities in web browsers).
Basically it comes down to what concessions do you want to make in order to limit how much memory a user will potentially use in a browser.
And, of course, that's even before we get to any potential always on applications. When it comes to those do you want the bare bones applets that exist currently on PS3/X360? Or would you rather something better than the horrible stuff you get with "SmartTVs"?
As an example. Skype without any video conferencing going on. Only one text chat session already uses almost 60 MB of memory on my system. I'm not sure how much it uses during Video chat as I don't do video chat. But I've seen other users claim it uses 130-150 MB on their system. And that's just one potential type of app that people might want to use and might want to have always on. And it has a relatively simple interface.
Would 1 GB be enough for the OS, services, apps, etc.? Possibly. For the life of the console? In the same quality and functionality to be able to match the competition if it becomes a key selling point with consumers?
Sony are saying the right things by saying they are focusing on the gamers first. But I don't doubt for a single second that are just as interested as Microsoft are in attracting a much larger audience than core gamers.
Sony has wanted a living room entertainment portal since the PS2. The PS4 will be their first real shot at accomplishing that. Personally, I think it would be unwise to limit your options for the entire life of the console by reserving too little at the start of the generation. Once a game uses the maximum amount of memory allowed for games, you can never take that memory back for the OS. At least if you want all those OS features to be available while playing the game.
Regards,
SB
