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We have written plenty articles upon Playstation 4 and its hardware, although some points were still unknown, like the RAM distribution. The system has 8GB, but developers will be able to use until 5.5GB for videogames, the rest would be for the OS.

Digital Foundry, the tech Eurogamer section, claims that PS4 has the following RAM distribution: games will have 4.5GB of RAM guaranteed; the OS may use the rest, 3.5GB. 1 GB of RAM is flexible, this means 1 GB of RAM could be used with games or with the OS. Therefore, PS4 could dedicate until 5.5GB of RAM for games. Enough quantity for the first games, maybe they will have to be more flexible with this amount and let in the future to dedicate more RAM for games and less for the OS.

I would like to remind that Xbox One allocates 3GB of RAM for the OS and the rest for games, this is 5GB. Excerpted from Digital Foundry:

Sony’s internal docs say that 4.5GB is the baseline amount of guaranteed memory available for game-makers (note the memory usage of the Killzone: Shadow Fall demo) and most likely what the lion’s share of launch titles will be using.

However, other sources close to Sony indicate that developers can request up to an additional gigabyte of ‘flexible memory,’ and use it to boost elements of the game – but only if the background OS can spare it.

Speaking about the chance to reduce the RAM that the OS needs:

In short, while there is no guarantee of change in the future, Sony is at least leaving the door open to the opportunity and the R&D team has experience in reducing the OS footprint – just as it did on PlayStation 3.

Altogether folks, what do you think? 5.5GB of RAM would be enough for games?

Thanks, Gematsu.