The battle between Microsoft"s Xbox One and Sony"s PlayStation 4 in terms of their hardware and performance continues as a new report claims Sony"s next-generation game console allows game developers to use up to 4.5 GB of its 8 GB of RAM. The other 3.5 GB is reserved for the PS4"s operating system.
However, the report from Eurogamer, based on unnamed sources, also claims that Sony might let games access an additional amount of RAM, up to one more GB, in the PS4"s memory pool under special circumstances. The article makes it clear that not all PS4 games will be allowed to access this extra amount of RAM.
The PS4"s game memory usage compares well to Microsoft"s Xbox One, which allocates 5 GB of its own 8 GB of RAM for game developers. The Eurogamer article claims that the Xbox One"s RAM requirements are fixed and can"t be changed, unlike the PS4.
As we have reported before, the 8 GB of RAM inside the PS4 is of the GDDR5 variety, clocking at 5500 MHz for 170.6 GB/s of bandwidth. This compares to 8 GB of the older DDR3 RAM for the Xbox One, with a clock speed of 2133 MHz for just 68.3 GB/s of bandwidth, along with 32 MB of eSRAM that is supposed to have 102 GB/s of embedded memory bandwidth. A recent rumor is claiming Microsoft might be able to increase the speed of that embedded memory to 192GB/s for the final retail version of the console.
Source: Eurogamer