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Have the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 really future-proofed their new consoles when it comes to RAM capacity? Although set up in slightly different configurations, both consoles possess essentially 512MB of RAM for developers to take advantage of. With such a dramatic improvement in RAM over the last generation of consoles, surely the Xbox 360 and PS3 are immune from being bypassed by PC configurations any time soon, right?

Think again. Try it more like this: they’re already outmoded.

With the introduction of Windows Vista, 512MB of RAM is the absolute minimum the system will run on, and most games had bypassed that a few months before Vista was introduced. In fact, the average Vista configuration has about five times more RAM available to it than either the 360 or the PS3.

Recently, I was browsing through a Best Buy, looking at the new models. While I’m note quite ready to buy a completely new PC and was hoping to get by with a computer memory upgrade, even that seems insufficient after looking over specs demanded by the newest PC games.

Just to focus on the memory aspect, a less expensive PC has anywhere between 1GB to 1.5GB of all-purpose RAM, and the average system has a solid 2GB of RAM these days. Add to that the fact that most decent graphics accelerators now pack on an extra 512MB, which is likely to go up to 1GB over the next year or so, and by Christmas, between general RAM and video RAM, most PCs will soon have between 2.5GB to 3GB of RAM available for game developers to take advantage of.

Compare that to the 512MB of RAM found on 360 and PS3, and it won’t take long for there to be a healthy upswing in the popularity of a new generation of PC software. Both Microsoft and Sony should have planned better, and included at least 1GB of system memory in their spiffy new consoles. By the time 2011 rolls around PCs will feature between 6GB to 10GB of RAM, I predict, and those 512MB of RAM on PS3 and 360 will once again look puny and outdated.

With a little extra market research, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 could have set the bar higher for the PlayStation 3. While the Xbox 360 Core system was always a joke, $399.99 for the Xbox 360 Premium system was a bit of a sticker-shock but was sold as being relatively “future-proofed.” Yet with only a 20GB hard drive, that’s turning out not to be the case.

Microsoft itself has basically admitted as much recently when it announced the impending release of yet a third configuration, the Xbox 360 Elite system. The 360 Elite contains only two major upgrades: a larger hard drive, weighing in at 120GB, and an HDMI output that ought to have been included on all 360 systems to begin with. The Elite doesn’t even toss in an HD-DVD drive; that’s still an extra.

For these two minor upgrades, Microsoft is asking $479.99, only $20 shy of the price of Sony’s lower-end PlayStation 3 unit, which may have a smaller hard-drive at 20GB, but has HDMI and Blu-Ray DVD playback. What this waffling has come to demonstrate is that Sony’s marketing reps were correct all along: PlayStation 3 at $499.99 or $599.99 is actually not that bad a deal, for everything you get at those prices.

The funny thing is, a bit more market research could have prevented the debacle; anyone with half a brain could have told Microsoft that a 20GB hard drive would not have been enough to future-proof the 360, especially since the company has known for years they wanted to use Xbox Live to distribute music, TV shows and movies in digital format. Or that HDMI and 1080p output was essential to call their box a “true HD” unit.

With a bit more vision, the 360 could have looked far more visionary and beat Sony’s position on pricing. As it stands, those PS3 prices don’t look that inflated after all, anymore.