Speaking candidly with Gamingbolt, Crytek’s US Engine Business Development Manager Sean Tracey revealed that although the PS4 and Xbox One offer an upgrade in raw power over their last-gen counterparts, the 8GB of RAM boasted by each console can be “easily filled up.”
Tracey’s statements follow rumours earlier today that the studio is working on Ryse: Knights of England.
“We are delighted with the updates to the next-gen hardware but of course always want more! The unified architecture of the APU’s allows us to easily leverage massive amounts of resources for all kinds of features including rendering, physics, animation and more,” explained Tracey adding “Though the PS4 and Xbox-One don’t offer an enormous jump over the previous generation in terms of raw processing power, the custom AMD APU’s within both platforms represent a huge leap forward in terms of integration and capability.”
When asked about the 8GB of RAM contained within each console Tracey agreed that it’s easy to fill it up quickly especially when in some cases developers don’t have access to all 8GB. “I would have to agree with the viewpoint that 8 gigs can easily be filled up, but also keep in mind that developers don’t necessarily even have access to all 8 gigs of it. For example the Xbox One retains some of the RAM for OS purposes.
“Since technology, as Ray Kurweil states, progresses exponentially, we will soon find that the computational requirements of games will quickly hit the ceiling of a few gigs of RAM.” Tracey concludes that managing memory usage will be one of the limiting factors if games development in this generation, but believes that by intelligently leveraging the technology developers will be able to create graphically impressive games.
“We already had to manage quite intensely our memory usage throughout Ryse and this will be one of the limiting factors surely in this generation. As hardware gets stronger the complexity of scenes can be increased and the dynamism within them. However, with that said it’s not the raw power alone that will allow for photorealistic graphics but technology that intelligently scales and utilizes all that the hardware has to offer.”
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