What If PlayStation 4 Launched With Its Original 4GB Of RAM?

► Public Domain Thumbnail Image By Evan-Amos

[ridiculous_gaming]

As far as I know, the 360 was to have only 256mb of ram, but Gears of War developers demanded 512mb instead.

[marklarz]

Next video: "What if Playstation 5 didn't have backwards compatibility, having on the console "only possible on PS5" games?"

[jmtradbr]

it would be a 720p machine with worse textures at the end of life.

[sovo]

I'd be far more interested in a theoretical 2gb "PS3 Pro" with an upgraded GPU, INSTEAD of the PS4.

[TechRyze]

PSP nearly had less RAM than 32MB, then the later revisions had the RAM doubled for caching purposes.

[Nintenboy]

The hard drive would probably be pushed even harder for data streaming. Or games would have considerably worse textures and shadows.

[sebbbi]

I remember Ubisoft AAA team rendering leads being extremely happy when they got the news. Assumption was that Sony can’t afford more than 4GB of fast GDDR memory. Microsoft used a lot of die space for 32MB ESRAM, allowing them to ship with 8GB slow DDR memory. But they had to settle with slightly smaller GPU. Sony had big memory bandwidth advantage, but they had less memory. Or at least that’s how it was going to be. I don’t know how much extra money they lost in the first years because of doubling the GDDR, but it allowed them to position PS4 as the premium gamer device. Xbox One had non-gaming ambitions: Kinect and TV input. And they made a mistake requiring always-online.

[ZetsubouMar]

A PS4 with 4GB of RAM and the Xbox One with the always online stuff, yeah, that would have been a weird generation, but the Wii U probably had a better chance in that scenario.

[robertt]

4gb of system ram was the minimum for PCs, then they also had 2gb of dedicated memory for the lower mid-tier GPUs. The issue is that during the lifecycle of the console, 8gb became the minimum for system ram and GPUs moved to 4gb(similar tier). The 4gb unified memory would have really hurt the longevity of the ps4 and the Xbox would have ended up being the better console even with less horsepower.

[The_Ostrich]

Lmao these console makers really have no clue how to handle the whole RAM situation. If it weren't for Epic Games the Xbox 360 would have 256mb instead of 512mb of RAM, if it weren't for Japan Studio the PS4 would have 4GB instead of 8GB of RAM and if it weren't for Capcom the Switch would have 2GB instead of 4GB of RAM 😂. And it was all for just one game, Epic Games wanted double the RAM for Gears of War, Japan Studio wanted it for Knack and Capcom wanted it for Monster Hunter Rise.

[forrandomsites]

Doesn't the os reserve like 3gb? 🗿 Damn, games would've been really different had it only 4gb ram

[taytzuleong]

What if PS3 and XBOX 360 had 1GB of RAM back in the day

[rducsfi]

probably would've pushed devs to be more creative with resource usage

[hammersampson]

This “leak” was probably counterintelligence to trick Microsoft into releasing Xbox One with only 4GB of RAM. 😂

[GlassICE]

Then it would've been a laughing stock (Just answering the title's question)

[ronny]

Technically lowering the resolution of textures would have resulted in a lot less memory consumption. Theoretically the frame rates would be even a bit higher, caused by the lowered bus transfers and of cause the saved memory lookups for every pixel in RAM. But as sharp and not blurry images are the new "pixelated" 2D graphics art of nowadays, that was thankfully never an option.
Going more to streaming textures like the PS5 does with the SSD power was of cause also not a real option with the much slower HDD and especially the Blu Ray drive.

[AidGum]

You forgot to mention how they sacrificed the included camera in order to put in 8GB of RAM at the price point they wanted.

[ren]

Still a 1080 but with bad texture quality, short draw distance, and bad object loading times. Bottle neck style

[Journey_to_who_knows]

I miss this weird era where things had ridiculously limited specs to save money and talented workers still managed to do crazy stuff with it. Now we got phones that can render the whole globe and sht, it doesn’t seem exciting.

[faustianblur]

They'd have clawed a lot of it back by dropping the constant recording feature and other OS junk. The base PS4 reserves 3GB for the OS, almost half the installed memory, which is just nuts for a dedicated games console.