A new report states that Sony’s upcoming PlayStation 4 console reserves 3.5GB of its main system memory for its operating system – slightly greater than its competitor, Microsoft’s Xbox One, has taken heat for doing.

Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry cites “a well-placed development source” for its claim that the PlayStation 4’s operating system keeps 3.5GB of its 8GB of RAM to itself, leaving only 4.5GB for games to take advantage of. However, the documentation shown to the publication says that another 1GB is obtainable as “flexible memory” that may be used on a limited basis when not being engaged by the OS – but that incorporating this extra gigabyte is a troublesome engineering task for developers.

The Xbox One keeps 3GB reserved for its operating system consistently. Microsoft’s rationale, presumably shared by Sony if this report is accurate, is that the positive factors of instant application-switching outweigh the constraints any such system imposes on game developers.

Microsoft’s console also reserves two of its eight CPU cores for the operating system’s use. Digital Foundry has published a purported screenshot of a Killzone: Shadow Fall development tool that the web site says strongly means that the PS4 likewise makes only six of its eight CPU cores available to developers.

Digital Foundry also cites other sources “close to Sony” as saying that the corporate could downsize the operating system’s memory footprint later within the console’s lifecycle with optimizations that increase its efficiency, whereas the Xbox One’s 3GB allocation is kind of set in stone. 

We’ve reached out to Sony for comment.

[Source: Digital Foundry]

Our Take:
Those supposed advantages that the PS4 was set to enjoy over the Xbox One sure appear dropping like flies, don’t they? I’m no fan of the unbearable wait to elevate the Xbox Guide or the somewhat more manageable delay in calling up the PS3 XMB, but reducing your system’s available memory by 43 percent is a high price to pay. RAM is crucial resource for lots new modes of gameplay and other innovations that developers want to create on next-gen consoles. I’m interested by my friends list instantly shooting up on screen when called for, but do i need that on the cost of another 20 AI-driven characters active on this planet? That’s a miles harder question.

4.5GB of GDDR5 continues to be a large bonanza of high-speed memory for developers to work with in 2013, but do we still be saying that during five years when Nvidia is rolling out unified CPU/GPU architecture with 16GB of similarly fast RAM for $200 tablets? As sexy because the PS4/XB1 tech specs are today, keep in mind that they’re broadly kind of like mid/high-end PCs available presently and that technology gets faster and less expensive day-to-day. Ten years is ages to fasten in a hardware spec for, and that i question the wisdom of both Sony and Microsoft cutting their systems off on the knees like this.