A new rumor suggests that PlayStation 4 developers will be able to use less than 70% of PlayStation 4’s RAM for games.
While Sony’s new console will contain 8GB of DDR5 memory total,
Digital Foundry reports that 3.5GB of that space is reserved for the operating system, leaving only 4.5GB available for games. Anonymous sources clarified to Digital Foundry that 1GB of the reserved RAM is available as “flexible memory” and “may be reclaimed from the OS reservation, based on availability,” making 5.5GB potentially accessible.
Internal Sony documents suggest that 4.5GB is the “baseline amount of guaranteed memory available” for games, but that the additional 1GB of “flexible memory” can be used by devs to “boost elements of the game” as long as the memory isn’t needed by PlayStation 4’s OS. PS4 dev kits currently contain a “Game Memory Budget Mode” that offers “normal” and “large” options, with normal allowing for 4.5GB of memory usage by games, while “large” boosts that number to 5.25GB.