Will the PS4 reserve 5GB ram for games?
Online speculation suggests so. But following a story on Digital Foundry, PS4 developer Vblank Entertainment have been quick to quash the rumours.
Branding the rumours “absolutely false", Head of the company Brian Provinciano referred to the gossip as “absolutely ridiculous”, producing an editorial on the topic in which he provided much needed insight.
Yet despite the release, Provinciano wouldn’t go as far as to confirm the exact amount of memory used for PS4 games.
Digital Foundry followed up on its report yesterday claiming PS4 reserves 4.5GB of memory for games, with an additional gigabyte of ‘flexible’ memory, and 3.5GB for the operating system.
"Today, new sources tell the site that, similar to yesterday, 4.5 gigabytes of PlayStation 4′s 8 gigabytes of GDDR5 memory is currently guaranteed to game developers, and an additional 512 megabytes of physical RAM from the flexible memory may be available in addition," the article reads.
The report comes with comment from Sony, who didn’t confirm the amount of memory reserved or what it is used for, but offered to clear up misunderstandings regarding “direct” and “flexible” memory systems.
“‘Direct Memory’ is memory allocated under the traditional video game model, so the game controls all aspects of its allocation,” a Sony rep said.
“‘Flexible Memory’ is memory managed by the PS4 OS on the game’s behalf, and allows games to use some very nice FreeBSD virtual memory functionality.
"However this memory is 100 per cent the game’s memory, and is never used by the OS, and as it is the game’s memory it should be easy for every developer to use it.”
Following Sony’s statement, Digital Foundry also claims there is 4.5GB of conventional RAM available to developers, alongside the OS-controlled flexible memory described by Sony.
“We understand that this is a 1GB virtual address space, split into two areas – 512MB of on-chip RAM is used (the physical area) and another 512MB is ‘paged,’ perhaps like a Windows swap file,” the site reports.
“But to be clear, of the 8GB of GDDR5 on PS4, our contention is that 5GB of it is available to developers.”
Over on NeoGAF, known insider Thuway has added further fuel to the fire by hinting that the console will reserve six gigabytes of RAM for games and two for the operating system.
“There are games in development that are using 6 GB of RAM," it reports.
Further confirmation of these rumours come in the form of another insider BruceLeeRoy and forum admin Kagari both appearing to corroborate Thuways report.