Today, Sony and some unnamed developers have confirmed to Joystiq.com that they have indeed reduced the RAM usage of the OS memory footprint. Those of you who have been around since December, may remember Patrick Steen writing an article detailing how Sony has reduced the usage of RAM from roughly 120MB (originally) to 50MB.
SCEA’s Patrick Seybold confirmed the report and had the following to say, “Since the launch of the PS3, we have been continuously making efforts to reinforce our support system to game developers, allowing them to express their creativity freely on the PS3. As part of this support for game development, the size of the PS3 OS memory footprint has been reduced through network update for the game developers.”
Seybold then clarified how unlocking 70MB more of RAM would benefit developers in the long run by saying “any bit of RAM helps. Generally it probably won’t change design, but might allow extra effects resolution or dynamic lights or something. Probably more beneficial from the systems and art side then from design/gameplay.”
This is a great step forward for the PlayStation 3 as cutting down its RAM to 50MBs puts it a lot closer to Microsoft’s staggeringly small 32MBs. But note, this isn’t something Sony has stealthy updated in the past few months, the platform holder has been reducing the PS3′s OS memory footprint from the day it was launched. For those interested in how and why Sony has been able to give RAM back to developers, please refer to our previous article.
anything giving the developers more freedom is a good thing. wonder whether they can reduce it further?
@Patrick Steen Oh I see now, with this upgrade, the game developers would have more RAM to use to operate their games?
Exactly.
catching up on 360
Its good that they reduced the amount of memory used by the OS because now games can have more memory to use. Sony decrease of OS memory usage make it on par with Microsoft Xbox 360 memory usage.
@starspeed and anyone who says catching up to the 360. It really will not make a whole difference. They will be able to do some things. They seem to be fine with what they had, so they should honestly use the extra for in-game music, faster in-game, and things of that such.
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