Tkumpathenurple
Veteran
I'm curious if fully unified memory might go away next generation.Why would next consoles have 32 GBs RAM if PC gets away without it? That's a lot of additional cost. If there's a RAM bump, I'd guess only to 24 GBs. I think it's more important to spend on BW, so I'd like to see stacked RAM. Would definitely take a 16 GB RAM console with HBM over a 32 GB console.
The transition to GDDR7 should get us to 1024GB/s of main memory bandwidth even if they just stick with 16GB on a 256 bit bus. That's already nothing to be sniffed at, and should be an element which facilitates easy B/C, but might a relatively small pool of additional HBM be the move?
We've seen IC be of sizeable utility in RDNA2+ GPU's and RDNA3 has taken baby steps towards chiplets, so maybe there's scope for a little stack of HBM. Slower than SRAM cache, but far cheaper per MB, and sufficient for BVH structures while alleviating bandwidth constraints from the main memory.
And at the risk of becoming unfocussed in this post, I think there needs to be something unique about the next generation other than existing features simply improving (including ray tracing.)
To that end, I propose persistence, and something akin to Intel's Optane or Sony's ReRAM will facilitate this. Having games thrash the SSD with writes is risky business when you consider the number of developers, not all of whom will follow best practices. Persistent memory limits scope for SSD degradation, and allows developers to go wild writing, for example, updated world states.
So I predict the PS6 will come with 128GB of ReRAM, and this is what games will be streamed from. Save states/RAM dumps can be stored on it in 2 seconds. Games will flush it and copy over to it each time they're instanced. It will be user replaceable, so buying a new "memory card" can allow you to hold multiple instances.
It also opens up the possibility of ludicrously expensive special editions of games. I know I'd buy GTA6 on its own, dedicated ReRAM cartridge.