PS4 only allows 4.5gb RAM and 6 Cores for Game OS

[GaryOPA]

The other 2 Cores and 3.5gb of RAM is for System OS

Breaking news, the Sony OS is HUGE and eats up a big chunk of that 8gigs of RAM along with 2 cores on the CPU, allowing only a max. of 4.5gb of RAM for Games, with another 1gig that is flexible memory

As the news broke today that Sony System OS is huge, eating up a ton of resources and large chunk of RAM, just like the XBOX ONE is rumored to be doing, we hear reports on the grapevine that thousands and thousands of Sony fanboys have cancelled their PS4 pre-orders over this very sad news item, that even tho the PlayStation 4 will be shipping with 8gigs of RAM, only 4.5gigs will be Game Usage, the rest is for all that 'sharing', 'social', 'psn', and other features, and that is also going to eat up 2 of your 8 cores leaving only 6 cores for game developers to use to power their next-gen video games.

Sony's internal docs say that 4.5GB is the baseline amount of guaranteed memory available for game-makers (note the memory usage of the Killzone: Shadow Fall demo) and most likely what the lion's share of launch titles will be using. However, other sources close to Sony indicate that developers can request up to an additional gigabyte of "flexible memory", and use it to boost elements of the game - but only if the background OS can spare it. We're told that incorporating this isn't trivial, and it may well be that to begin with only first-party developers target its usage.

Current PlayStation 4 dev kits have a "Game Memory Budget Mode" in the debug settings featuring two options: normal and large. The normal mode setting confirms that 4.5GB of memory is usable for game applications. The large mode increases this considerably to 5.25GB, but the docs are clear that the extra RAM here is only available for application development, presumably in order to house debugging data. From what we understand, the extra gig of flexible memory appears to work in addition to these allowances.

The news that the PS4's OS reservation is in the same ballpark as Xbox One's equivalent 3GB allocation is sure to surprise many, especially bearing in mind that previously leaked Sony docs have only spoken of a 512MB allocation for the system software - though this information hails from the era where the new PlayStation was slated to ship with only 4GB of memory.

So is this shocking news going to change your mind on what next-gen system to buy?

NEWS SOURCE: DigitalFoundry PS4 System Software Memory (via) EuroGamer

[xPreatorianx]

Holy shit! Not even Windows 7 takes up that much of the system's resources. WTF are they doing to require THAT MUCH? Must be some pretty innovative shit, or some pretty shitty and unoptimized code.

I mean the Xbox one has a bit of an excuse. It has multiple OS. So it is of course going to require a bit more resources considering the system is running three OS in tandem.