The PS5 and Next Xbox Probably Won’t Get Massive RAM Boosts
Marc-André Jutras, technical director at Cradle Games and veteran of the AAA game industry for more than 15 years, thinks that the next generation of consoles is going to have somewhere between 8 and 12 GB of RAM. Although some people were expecting a higher jump to 16 GB, Jutras doesn’t believe the increase will be that big.
“I don’t think we will see 16GB of RAM, most games don’t use that much RAM anyway,” he said. “I think the next generation will be between 8 and 12, probably. What you will see however is probably a good amount of cores. I wouldn’t be surprised if the next gen was Ryzen 2600 or something like that. Because it is really stable, cheap, and has a good amount of cores.”
But Jutras does believe that consoles will have a big chunk of dedicated VRAM to deal with 4K graphics, which will increase the total memory pool far beyond the 8GB that the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One offer.
“One thing that is going to change will be, you will get a lot more focus on the VRAM, which is the big bottleneck right now if you want good 4K games, because 4K frame buffer takes a lot of space,” he said. “So if you end up with a 4K buffer, you need four times the VRAM. So I think you will see, you won’t see shared RAM space next gen like you do with the PS4. I don’t think you will see that because it’s a big bottleneck. You’ll see more VRAM to support 4K and 5K and whatever else comes around. Just how much of that? I wouldn’t be surprised if the PS5 had 8GB of RAM and 8GB of VRAM.”