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Third-party developers were not aware that PlayStation 4 would include 8GB of GDDR5 RAM until Sony’s reveal event in February – despite having received development kits long before the console’s announcement.
Speaking with VideoGamer.com, Just Add Water’s CEO Stewart Gilray – who is developing a mystery title for PlayStation 4 – revealed that third-parties were initially told that the console would feature only 4GB of RAM, and were left happily surprised when the system’s lead architect Mark Cerny discussed the console’s specs on stage.
“We were told [PS4] was 4GB originally,” Gilray told us, “and we first knew it had 8GBs when Mark said at the event’s stage, ‘And it has 8GB of memory.’ We’d had kits at that point for a good while.”
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Gilray suspects that only “a couple of really close first-parties” knew PS4 would feature 8GB prior to the console’s announcement, “but I think most third-parties, if not all third-parties were like, ‘Yeah, 4GB, awesome, can’t wait.’
“It’s a fantastic amount of memory,” he continues, “especially DDR5 memory, because it’s so fast you don’t have to have everything there at once. You can swap it in and out instantly, effectively. But when they said 8GB it was like, ‘Ooookay.'”
Leaked systems specs for PlayStation 4 – back when it was still going under its codename ‘PlayStation Orbis’ – also suggested that the console would only include 4GB of RAM.
An “added bonus” of PS4’s memory is that Sony has “already ring-fenced the system memory away from the game memory,” Gilray adds, “so there’s none of this business that we had with PS3 of having to share memories.
“When you press the PlayStation button on a PS3 game, you get the basic XMB up [but] to do anything you have to quit the game, because of the memory for it. With PS4 we don’t have that because the system memory is already ring-fenced for itself.”
Gilray’s comments suggest that third-party developers could have been developing PS4 games targeting lower system requirements than the console’s actual capability – which could go some way to explaining the suspected 30fps cap on the Unreal Engine 3-powered Thief.
PlayStation 4 is expected to launch worldwide later this year.
Source: VideoGamer.com Interview
