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will feature between 6GB to 10GB of RAM, I predict, and those 512MB of RAM on PS3 and 360 will once again look puny and outdated.