20 May 2014

CryTek Developer Warns PS4 And Xbox One Facing Huge RAM Limitations


Ryse: Son of Rome developer CryTek has warned that being limited to 8GB of RAM will be a huge shortcoming for both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

Both current-gen consoles come packing 8 gigs of memory, a huge chunk of which is taken up by each system’s OS. While many of the early titles have looked fantastic, CryTek’s business development manager Sean Tracy has said that it is already encountering RAM limitations on PS4 and Xbox One…



Speaking in an interview with GamingBolt, Tracy claimed that “Though the PS4 and Xbox One don’t offer an enormous jump over the previous generation in terms of raw processing power, the custom AMD APU’s within both platforms represent a huge leap forward in terms of integration and capability.

“We are delighted with the updates to the next-gen hardware but of course always want more! The unified architecture of the [Accelerated Processing Units] allows us to easily leverage massive amounts of resources for all kinds of features including rendering, physics, animation and more.”

While this may all sound like great news for console gamers, Tracy was quick to put the kibosh on this news, signalling alarm when revealing that Xbox One launch title Ryse: Son of Rome pushed the system to its limit thanks to RAM limitations.

“I would have to agree with the viewpoint that 8 gigs can easily be filled up, but also keep in mind that developers don’t necessarily even have access to all 8 gigs of it,” Tracy continued. “For example the Xbox One retains some of the RAM for OS purposes.

“We already had to manage quite intensely our memory usage throughout Ryse and this will be one of the limiting factors surely in this generation. As hardware gets stronger the complexity of scenes can be increased and the dynamism within them. However, with that said it’s not the raw power alone that will allow for photorealistic graphics but technology that intelligently scales and utilizes all that the hardware has to offer.”

It’s worth bearing in mind that the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 both came packing a meagre 512MB of RAM, which was still enough to produce gaming beauties such as The Last of Us, Grand Theft Auto V, and Halo 4.

Do you think this console generation will age quicker than any before it?

The Xbox 360 took a whopping 8 years to be succeeded by the Xbox One, how quickly do you think Sony and Microsoft will come back with new consoles?

Let me know!

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