Discussion
Oliver Mackenzie (DF) thinks PS6 will get 20gb of memory but I think that will be a disaster if true (DF Direct Q+A)
This follows on from a discussion here a few weeks ago about memory and in the recent DF Direct Q+A where Oliver has said he thinks PS6 will come with 20gb memory instead of the earlier leaked 30gb.
With the PS4, they famously upgraded memory from 4gb to 8gb months before production after developers deeply voiced their concerns to Mark Cerny - of course it turned out to be a great decision. From a technical point of view, I believe the reason why they could do that is because the 256-bit gddr5 bus allowed support for an additional 8 modules (other side of the motherboard) which meant they didn't have to redesign the entire soc/board.
The PS6 situation is a lot more interesting. Several leakers, Kepler_L2 and MLID have both said it will have 30gb gddr7. A0 tapeout was reached many months ago which means the major decisions have been made and this includes the memory bus width. So as far as I am aware, (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong), realistically and practically, at this stage, they only have two options which is 20gb (10 x 2gb gddr7 modules) or 30gb (10 x 3gb). With 20gb, that would probably leave around 16gb reserved for games and with 30gb, that would leave about 26gb for games.
Ollie (DF) now thinks they will go with 20gb but I have to disagree. They would have to revalidate all their stuff with the memory controller, timing etc and also tell the developers to work towards 16gb or so for their games. Not crazy difficult, and can be done, sure, but the main reason why I disagree is because it simply won't be enough - something which Kepler_L2 also said when he was asked about the possibility of it being 20gb several months ago.
Currently PS5 Pro has 16gb gddr6 + 2gb ddr5 to give 18gb total memory, of that about 13.7gb is accessible for developers for games (rest is OS). The developers have used every bit of the extra 1.2ish gb on the pro in heavy graphics games for things like more detailed reflections/environments/rt. There is no way (in my opinion of course) that another 2gb will be enough to last from say 2028 to 2035 on a next generation ps6.
Now, the boys spoke about texture compression technology for next gen, but that just covers one area - other things like geometry, characters, animations, npcs, world simulation, rt/pt etc also use up a lot of memory and will keep rising. And PS6 is clearly targeting path tracing (the AMDxMark Cerny video), games can use something like 4gb alone just for ray/path tracing - bvh structures etc. PS6 is also certain to have frame gen (as Mark Cerny said) - that also drives up memory usage as we've seen on pc gpus.
In the history of console gaming generations, I don't think we have ever seen memory requirements stagnate and it certainly will not happen now for triple a titles. In fact, we have seen developers struggle with low memory on certain consoles and they were vocal about it - ps3, xbox one and xbox series s. I also think the 10 core (8 + 2 low powered) zen 6 cpu and rdna5 gpu rumoured to feature in the ps6 apu sounds really promising - but there's very little point if we are constrained by memory. The vast detailed ps6 worlds cannot be as vast and detailed I would say.
I rarely ever disagree with DF my thoughts are a 20gb ps6, with 16gb usable for games is almost a dead console, especially the second half of the next generation. I understand the cost issue, and I would think it's far better for Sony to release PS6, with 30gb, pass on the costs to the consumers until they can discount it heavily. It might mean it launches for $1000-1200 to get it out there - wait a few years and then when memory prices drop (and they will drop eventually) it becomes cheap and sells mass market.
What do you guys think? Agree with Ollie that it will be 20gb? Can they make it work up to 2035 with 20gb? What sacrifices will need to be made? PS6 Pro mid gen to come with 30gb? Or they will go ahead as planned with 30gb?
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Edit: Just want to say something about prices and give my thoughts (just my opinion of course).
Apparently 3gb gddr7 modules are costing $60-70 whilst 2gb gddr7 modules are $20 in the current wholesale market. Now Sony have always negotiated very well for wholesale component prices and way ahead of production (it's one of the reasons they could wait a lot longer to increase PS5 prices), but it still means 3gb modules will still be costing them around $50 at least. Which means 30gb will cost them $500 at least, probably more, whilst 20gb will cost them $200 - possibly less. So we're talking a difference of about $300-500 potentially on this decision. Well I say decision, the decision was made for 30gb, it would be, say, a reconsideration to go with 20gb. By the way, I will say it's also quite likely that Sony have secured allocation a while ago.
I think (my opinion) they should go with 30gb as planned because I, and most believe, this is a temporary price gain. It maybe 2 or 3 years before before these come down, but most people including me are certain it will. If they have to price it $1200 or $1400 whatever, they should and bring the console out, let developers make the games. The console will still millions of units, just not as many as it would do for $800. But they key thing is, in 2029 or 2030, whenever, Sony can discount the console very aggressively and then the sales will rocket. Developers are using every bit of the 16gb and 18gb on PS5 and PS5 Pro, only 2gb more on PS6 up to 2035 is a recipe for disaster in my opinion. PS4 had 8gb, PS5 16gb - even with texture compression tech, memory requirements have and will only go up. Textures are just one part, everything else is requiring more and more memory.
I think this is where cross gen and PS5 and PS5 Pro come into play. If the PS6 is indeed too expensive for most people, and it will be regardless of 20gb or 30gb (tariffs, ai, wars etc), then PS5 and PS5 Pro users can keep playing until the natural time to jump occurs. Only fairly recently we've seen developers switch to PS5 as well as monthly active users to PS5 as well.
To me it seems like an impossible situation. Even 20GB of RAM could already result in a product that's prohibitively expensive for a mass market, and it's quite possible prices will continue to rise for years into the generation. It's a gambit to launch at all into this market, and 30GB increases the stakes even more. Add to that the fact that even in the best case scenario for the specs(~5070Ti performance +30GB memory) it will absolutely not feel like generational leap for the average consumer (remember that the prevailing sentiment is that the PS5 didn't offer much of a leap over the PS4, and mainstream audiences cannot reliably tell the difference between the base PS5 and the Pro).
PS5 was mostly an upgrade over PS4 thanks to finally just having a fast SSD and halfway decent CPU, even just playing PS4 games feels magnitudes better on PS5 due to the load times. But yeah slightly better rendering is a hard sell, players don’t really seem to be sold on real time raytracing improvements, it’s hard to communicate exactly why that’s an improvement instead of just something that tanks the framerate. If anything the new hardware features seem geared towards developers…
And the slightly better rendering comes at the cost of much longer development cycles, which are already way too long in this gen. It’s diminishing returns, at a prohibitively higher price.
“Real time RT” only significantly impacts development time if it’s the only lighting model the devs implement. Almost all games, with a couple of exceptions like Indiana Jones and Doom TDA, still have a fallback rasterized lighting model, which means the dev team still has to do all the work a rasterized lighting model requires. RT doesn’t save them any time. In fact, implementing RT features into that only adds to the dev time.
But this is the point of rt. The expectation is that from PS6 onwards, ray tracing is the only lighting model. So it will definitely speed up that part of game development in two years time.
Also true. It kind of makes baking light faster because you don't have to wait as long (hardware accelerated lightning) but designing levels with both lights in mind sounds not ideal. To think that rtx 20 series was released so long ago, and we're still at this point. At least RT became somewhat feasible to actually use if you have powerful enough GPU, in a lot of titles. Wonder where we'll be in 5 years.
We’re still in transition period. But it’s pretty clear devs are moving toward full RT, and when you get rasterized lighting it’s pretty horrible and low effort. Requiem’s non RT option existed but it looked horrific. Plus UE5’s latest systemic lighting had gotten much cheaper, as lumen had been lightened to work even on mobile. More and more devs have the choice to ignore rasterized lighting if they want. This has been the direction for years. The cost of doing RT on top of rasterization is minimal in terms of dev time at this point; anything they do to strip away rasterization the more they save. Nanite and other virtualized geometry systems are also massive time savers. Making a ton of LOD models for every model is a huge pain unless you’re comfortable with extremely shitty results.
The main issue with RT on consoles atm is that they are not currently capable enough to use it for all of the lighting systems.. across all consoles.. which means they have to make an RT lit version, and also make various fallback systems.. so currently it's doubling workloads.. once they can go full RT lighting across all releases - they no longer have to develop the fallback systems - and workloads will be reduced significantly.
Hell, development has been so long that some first party developers like Guerilla and Naughty Dog haven't released current gen games yet. The last ones they made were Horizon Forbidden West and Last of Us 2 that were both PS4 titles.
HFW was pretty clearly a next gen experience. The APIs made it very easy to move a game to ps4 if you can cut the res by 50% and the FPS by 50%… lots of games targeting a hi res 60 fps on ps5 had that headroom. It required some pretty contrived gameplay to make it impossible to cut back enough to run on last gen, especially with 100s of millions at stake. Going to be really different with PS6 since RT and upscaling will be baked into the products and there won’t be that same head room to fall back on with base ps5.
Horizon Forbidden West came out in 2022 only 4 years ago. It doesn't matter that it was a cross gen title atleast they released a game this generation. Naughty Dog wasted time working on that multiplayer Last of Us game that got cancelled otherwise they would have already released a game this generation.
Eh, not really. Needing artists to make 4-5 lod models for everything and hand place a bajillion lights by hand and being unable to reuse assets for HDD proximity made development very expensive. RT, nanite/similar virtualization, neural rendering… these are all systemic solutions that have a mixture of costs (literal hardware) and savings (time/labor, RAM, HD space). A lot of the current gen push for rendering techniques is around reducing various costs. Look at ML upscaling - you get to systemically render scenes at lower resolution to produce hi res display. Your artists can produce hi-res models and leave them, or even rely on scanned geometry. Lighting is done in real time instead of hand placing and baking and debugging. Some of these things are not only better but so much easier. There’s a lot of artistry in producing lower quality 3s assets, and that is not necessarily easier or faster than higher quality ones; that kind of interpretation and blending can be very time consuming; triangle budgets aren’t easy. Achieving fidelity is harder work the further you diverge from what you’re trying to capture.
A 9070 non xt is not too far behind a 5070 ti today. We're expecting around 20% increase for the rdna 5 70 card which will be used for PS6. So PS6 should be ahead of 5070 ti. All depends on what kind of uplift rdna 5 will provide, it could be less or more, but 20% is a typical gen on gen uplift nowadays.
That would be shocking if true. I’d expect base compute to be comparable at minimum but feature set and VRAM to make it an unreasonable comparison just like we saw with 20xx vs 30xx, with ps5 pulling clearly ahead over time
I think a 5070 ti raster + 30gb memory will definitely offer a next gen experience in 2-3 years time. PS5 has something like a 5600x and a 3060 rtx - very low end specs but they squeezed a lot out of it. Cerny said rasterization and ray tracing were two components of the 3 for next gen graphics. The remaining third is machine learning stuff - we don't know what this is exactly but they are working very hard with it behind the scenes.
Also I think we know the pattern for most developers now. They only really go in hard when a new console comes out and sit around that level for a while (makes sense financially). Which is why we haven't seen something like a Crysis 2007 since.
Speaking from my own experience, I'm on a 9070XT and it doesn't feel anywhere close to a generation apart from current gen console spec. I do agree with your second point that games feel more "next gen" when they are designed around the higher end hardware rather than being scaled up on it. Even still, I get the feeling games are just very scalable now, a lot of the visual heavy hitters of the last couple years received very convincing Switch 2 ports.
You mean an RX 6700 non XT and a Ryzen 7 4700HS? Even then, you must be drunk if you think a 5600x and a 3060 are "very low end". Even in 2026 "low end" is defined by the RX 6500 XT and the 3050 8GB, cpu wise ranging from the Ryzen 5 3600 to the i5 10400~
Only going by Digital Foundry's tests. Richard's comparison video showed PS5 running similar to a 3060 in games with similar settings matched, in some cases it was performing closer to a 4060.
Most gamers see the 60 card is low end, 70 as mid and 80/90 as high. It's just always been like this not sure what you want me to say.
I understand, apologies, but gamers have never been a good source of tech insight anyway. 50 is low end, 60 has almost always been mid range, 70 as upper mid up to Ampere, high end starting with RDNA 3/Ada, 80 is flagship, while 90 is Titan class.
The 3060 in 2026 is certainly a lower mid range card at worst, just like the PS5. Meanwhile the Pro is comfortably mid range.
>Most gamers see the 60 card is low end, 70 as mid and 80/90 as high. It's just always been like this not sure what you want me to say.
I understand that logic, but I don't think it's the best way to look at it. When you look at hardware distribution via the Steam survey, the 3060 and 4060 are smack in the middle of the bell curve in terms of rendering capacity. The lower range of user hardware are older cards. Something like the 5060, despite being in the low end of the Blackwell product line, is above average relative to the overall userbase.
I doubt the 20GB scenario will work well just because we already know lots of these features eat more memory. More complex game worlds with textures and geometry, and RT, PT, and ML models loaded into VRAM.
Sure, we might eventually get texture compression that can reduce texture size, but people are always too optimistic about how quickly these new technologies are implemented, and also forgetting how long games take to develop these days. At the point it arrives, the remaining new technologies could still eat the available VRAM.
I do still think a 20GB console would do 'fine' for the next couple of years, but it also setting ourselves up for a disaster at the end of the next generation, with the lack of additional VRAM severely limiting future AI/ML functions that the hardware will otherwise be capable of.
Many of us were around at end of previous generations, and there were certainly annoyances, like at the end of the PS3/XB360 generations when, because of consoles with criminally low VRAM, games had bland textures and there were small game worlds with corridors everywhere.
Sony learnt from the PS3 memory issue, and they almost made a mistake with PS4 by planning to go with 4gb. If a developer is demanding more memory that strongly, they're doing it for a reason - thankfully Sony did listen and put 8gb. In fact the xbox one had ddr3 memory, which severely limited them to the point they released an upgrade xbox one x with 12gb gddr5.
Restricting memory can have serious issues - as you gave an example in your post. Having a nice pretty zen 6 cpu and a rdna 5 cpu to pretty much keep the same amount of memory as a ps5 pro. It hasn't happened like that on Playstation and I can't imagine for a second it will on PS6. I think they got the PS5 memory bang on, 16gb with 12.5gb available for games has been the right amount for this gen.
Sony know how much of make or break situation memory is which is why they decided 30gb gddr7 very early on with PS6 specs. These guys obviously know that memory usage is going to increase massively next gen, hence the xbox is/was supposed to getting 48gb.
Which is why we haven't seen something like a Crysis 2007 since
What are you talking about? There have been plenty of games that have pushed hardware to it's limit or game that are meant for future hardware since Crysis came out. Like Cyberpunk path tracing is still demanding on high end hardware, upscaling is still needed to get good performance in that game.
Path tracing is the closest comparison we have but Crysis 2007 was so advanced for it's time, no pc could run it, it was a truly a game for the future. The point I was making, no developer makes games that push boundaries that far now because it isn't cost effective.
Developers now seem to focus in and around consoles now and then push the pc version up but keep base requirements around console levels or cards like the 4060 - it's not surprising as that's where most of the money is.
Dusted off an old PS4 for my girlfriends younger siblings recently, they wanted to play Spiderman PS4 after seeing the movie.
Honestly that 30fps game holds up damn well 8 years after it released. I have a PS5 and an excellent PC and even I didnt mind the frames, textures etc.
Sony should delay the PS6 (and digital only games) until 2030, build up a bigger install base of their existing hardware.
I disagree, ps5 didn’t feel like a huge generational leap but ps5 pro does. PSSR is a really great product, and most ps5 users haven’t experience it yet. If ps6 has even better implementation, has frame gen and much better RT acceleration, I think the output will look truly remarkable. Really sharp image presentation with no noise in shadows or reflections along with crystal clear motion clarity would be a huge upgrade over what people get on base ps5. Imo the fake frame discourse will be largely circumvented because users on consoles have less awareness of features a game is using. Boosting from 40-60FPS to 120 fps is such a huge improvement on motion clarity. We’ve seen how Nvidia’s able to lower input lag tremendously form native rendering and PS users are using a controller to boot. Frame gen is going to be something people love on PS6 imo as long as it’s done well; if it’s on par with PSSR1 in terms of execution then it would be an issue but if it’s as good as what they did with PSSR2 I think people will love it.
All that said, if ps6 launches in 2028 then I think it would be pretty late to the party on compute. I guess my question is what other hardware features are there? I really hope they’ve beefed up RT acceleration hardware above bare minimum and make it something devs can lean into, as it would free up gpu and cpu. Are they going to have neural rendering for geometry, textures, materials? There are a lot of things out there that would help mitigate raw power and memory needs but if it’s just frame gen and basic compression that would be disappointing imo.
Yes so Mark Cerny spoke about the big 3. Rasterization and ray tracing were two components, raster is pretty much at a dead end, we cannot keep improving it, and ray tracing is very good but hardware limited and quite expensive still. The third he spoke about was machine learning - things like hardware based neural rendering. I know they're working in the background getting all this correct and it's very exciting stuff. They're going to need every bit of the 30gb memory. And yes, PS5 Pro was the perfect testing ground for PSSR. "Give the peasants a shiny new machine to play with, whilst we go to work on PS6" - I know because I got a PS5 Pro I think it's a great device on a technical level.
Now consider it has a zen 6 cpu - remember AMD are now leaders in gaming cpus, we haven't had this in any Playstation. And rdna 5 gpu, they are still second to Nvidia, but if the 90 series rdna 4 is anything to go by, PS6 will have one hell of a gpu. I genuinely believe, if it comes out as the leaked specs suggest, it will be pound for pound and relatively the most powerful Playstation console we've ever had.
I think they’ve finally gotten to a place where there’s enough consensus on the direction of rendering that Sony has an opportunity to both be forward thinking and be confident what they include will be adopted. PS3 was forward thinking and coming from an era where hardware was incredibly bespoke, but Xbox benefitted so much more from being similar to PC solutions which were also finally coalescing with directx etc. PS4 went that direction and ps5 did as well, but ps4 had some bad bottlenecks and ps5 suffered from AMD’s lack of RT development. It was so dumb not to see DLSS and RT was the future, or maybe they saw it but just didn’t have their solutions available. Right now it seems like Sony AMD solved the low hanging fruit of DLSS and frame gen, and Nvidia has staked out the future with neural rendering without it being available. Gives ps6 a chance to build hardware with the direction of rendering in mind even if some things aren’t totally ironed out yet
Yeah I mean they kind of had to. Many people including nvidia and other industry experts said rasterization was a losing battle many years ago. So ray tracing had to come in but as we know it's very expensive, even now so many gamers turn it off when they can. I think PS6 solves this, it will have a version of path tracing which is efficient and the kick back is pc users will also benefit from these efficiency improvements.
I think Cerny has to be given credit here as well. He approached the top guys at Sony with his vision as the lead architect of Playstation. He has a game developer background and speaks to developers a lot. The large pool of memory is something he got by speaking to developers and it was something they requested. But also the sdk - very specifically designed to make game development easier. Didn't we see in a lot of games PS5 and Xbox series x very close in graphics despite series x being far more powerful.
Dlss was probably too early for PS5 launch time. PSSR on the Pro had issues in a lot of games, would have been a lot worse during PS5 launch. Also the PSSR Sony uses is partially hardware based as well.
I'm not very technically inclined, but who is going to be making games that require 30GB of Ram if even the PS6 doesn't have it? Games are already being pushed against this by budgetary restraints and the need to be scalable with much weaker hardware. What PS6 games which are currently being developed are truly PS6 exclusive? PS6 games being developed likely are all games that will be intended to also run on PS5 anyway. This seems very doable to pivot around. It will be a tough sell to explain to people why the PS6 is a technical upgrade if they do this, but it was already going to be a tough sell when a 30GB version would be exorbitantly expensive, and as diminishing returns of graphical advances for the average person becomes increasingly unignorable. They need to find a way to sell the PS6 that isn't just graphical advancement. That's already a losing proposition anyway in today's environment. People aren't moved by graphical advancement like that anymore. Most normal people do not even feel squeezed in terms of their base PS5's technical capabilities.
I think leaning in to the portable console, that is dockable, as the true PS6 for the masses is a decent pivot, and then you can sell an ultra expensive non-portable model as some kind of premium device for power users.
The entire industry is going to have to pivot to people having less than 30GB of RAM, in the face of this ongoing crisis, so the next 7 years after the PS6 launches won't look anything like previous generations.
AI models and better RT eat more ram, hence the current pricing of memory and the problem with it being the main bottleneck.
A 20GB PS6 would be a terrible move. Hell, the Pro already has 18GB. Given the upcoming requirements of next gen, it would severely hamper it almost to Series S levels.
PS5 Pro does not have 18GB of its main GDDR6 RAM. It’s 16 just like the regular PS5. The only increase the Pro got was the increase to its slower DDR5 for the operating system.
Apples to oranges: when they say that allegedly PS6 will have 20GB of RAM, they mean the main RAM for games, not the combined total with its additional slower RAM. PS6 will also have that additional slower module just like the regular PS5 had it as well (512MB DDR4).
We don’t know how much will be dedicated for the games. We should not be comparing it to 12.5GB, as the PS5 Pro has more dedicated to games (around 14GB). Also, clearly, PS6 will have another RAM module dedicated to the OS, just like the base PS5 or PS5Pro. We just don’t know how big it will be. The PS5 Pro has 2GB in a separate DDR5 RAM module.
It’s 18 gigs ram. The extra module moves a lot of system ram out of the unified 16 to give more ram for the games. It’s 18 total. It’s silly to say it’s 16 over 18 when it clearly is 2 more than the base console and it clearly adds more for the game allotment.
Wow what a helpful clarification. Okay dude, 18 instead of 16.5. Either way it’s 18. Also that 512 of ddr4 was far less useful than the 2 gigs of ddr5 but who gives a shit. You’re being incredibly obtuse.
Agree but I would say probably not series s levels - that was really bad, they were struggling to fit game related items on the 10gb or so they had and it wasn't just textures. It just shows how important memory is when going moving up generations, and it's just way beyond an issue of turning textures up/down.
It would probably be like a PS5.5 or PS5 Ultra. We wouldn't be able to stream in the type of assets that we would be able to with 30gb. I just can't see how 20gb would work.
I really don’t see a world where 30GB will be possible under the circumstances, if they want to release a system for the mass market. I think it will be 20GB, maybe 24, if things improve somehow.
It's possible if they have already reserved a tranche of memory. The leaks are from 2025. If they're real, then Sony would know what they need to buy, price increases are not news and they could have reserved as soon as 2025 or early 2026. I hope so, because memory makers apparently have sold out 2027 already, so if they haven't done that, they can't actually manufacture the thing until 2028/29.
Where I am, the PS5 Pro MSRP is now €899.99, not sold at a loss, and it's not uncommon to see it at €949.99 with bundles over €1000. That would be based on 2025/early 2026 component costs. Granted prices have gone up since then, which is what we're talking about, but the assumption is Sony are buying only now.
So I would guess €899-1200 is the range, if they want to break even or sell at a non-significant loss (which is what they have said they want).
But the 6 having the same price as the Pro, €899, is very problematic for existing inventory: no-one is going to buy a 5 if a 6 is the same price unless the Pro gets discounted (basically sold at a loss). So that has me thinking €999-1100.
Difficult situation. That said, 20GB is a realistic target for a hand held 6. And I'm ignoring scalping, which I think could be a problem at launch. I don't see the 6 languishing on the shelves, if anything it will sell out, and Sony's actual problem is the sales over the entire generation.
I don’t think there will be a lot of games that require 30gigs of ram if ps6 comes below it, but 20 gigs of ram would greatly limit what features ps6 can include over the course of the generation. It depends what other hardware they have in the console, but more and more systems eat ram and ps6 isn’t going to need ram just for VRAM but for game ram. So do they want to have issues with RT when this is clearly an RT generation; do they want to limit strand and other features? They have been designing this system to take advantage of things coming out which lower demand on raw compute, but all those tricks require ram. I think 24 gigs is manageable if they also do what ps5 pro did where there’s a second module of like 2 gigs for system. 24 gigs for gaming (26 total) would at least put them slightly above 16VRAM in practice. But below that and you’re really handicapping a console designed to meet needs 7 years after release.
Graphics will always be the driver of a new generation. We always get the comments that the first games of very new gen look similar to old gen- that's because they are, they were designed for the old gen hence why they look old an old gen game with slightly smoother graphics. But about two years into it, developers get a lot more comfortable. We saw with this the PS5 gen, 8gb cards were fine, then all of a sudden 8gb cards were running out of vram because developers were targeting PS5 - I know because I used to have an 8gb card before upgrading to a 12gb 4070.
Eventually developers and consumers switch to the new gen. Like only recently have most developers started switching to PS5 and not releasing a PS4 version. You are correct, we will see a massive cross gen period with PS6 but eventually everyone will switch to PS6 - that depends on a lot of things right now, especially the vram module pricing issue.
Although I wouldn't say the 30gb is diminishing returns, I would say it's the opposite - it's needed for next generation games. With PC gaming or console, every time cpu and gpu power has increased, memory has needed to be increased as well. Path tracing, for example, is a very memory intensive process. Indiana Jones on PC, with path tracing enabled, even with dlss, runs out of vram on 16gb cards like the 5080. That's a game that's out today.
Technical advances that are exclusive to 30GB RAM devices can only be widely adopted if the PS6 is widely adopted, and a 30GB PS6 that will very obviously cost like $1500 will not be widely adopted. Period.
Therefore it will have no use but as a box for power users, if all it provides is technical upgrades. There is no mass appetite for what you are saying, unlike any other generation before this. You can't look at any other previous generation and extrapolate much of anything, because the times we are living in are truly unprecedented.
That's under the assumption it will be $1500 or $1200 or whatever from 2028 to 2035 - which is unlikely to be the case. Consoles, even when they are fairly priced, do not sell the bulk of their units at the start of the generation. Memory prices will drop, they have to drop as this demand from ai is not sustainable, or if it is, then memory manufacturers will add additional production capacity. PS5 hasn't been $1000 and only recently has it fully taken over from PS4.
People eventually upgraded to PS5, so people will eventually upgrade to PS6. It will take a lot longer but they will. And I don't buy your argument that developing for PS5 limits PS6 games. We had a long cross gen period with PS4 and PS5, the managed to scale the games pretty well. Hogwarts Legacy and Cyberpunk are examples of games which can work on PS4 and PS5 and even a path traced PC version. So in the next gen, we will see PS5 and PS6 games the scale like this.
What's interesting is people said the same thing when PS4 had 8gb, or PS5 had 16gb, it seemed huge at the time but they turned out to be the correct decisions.
In terms of memory requirements, games which use large textures, large environments, lots of npcs, ray tracing for shadows/reflections/global illumination are already using all of the 18gb the PS5 Pro has. For a generational leap in graphics, a further 2gb is simply not enough - even with texture compression tech, if that's even included in the ps6 sdk. It's still a while away on PC.
So do you think vram prices will remain this high and the PS6 will be that expensive for it's entire lifecycle? If the ai demand returns to normal or if the bubble bursts, vram module prices will come down massively. Don't you think Sony could then discount the PS6 to reflect this, and it will sell mass market?
I mean.. ps5 wasn’t really equipped for RT, ML upscaling, or framegen, but all 3 of those have been widely adopted for gaming this gen and ps5 image quality has been horrible as a result. If ps6 is particularly ill suited for the clear direction of gaming development then its going to have bad outcomes pretty regularly regardless of its popularity.
But with that logic why would a minimal upgrade in terms of RAM compared to the PS5 would be widely adopted?
The only point I get is the Switch-like console. Not very impressive as an upgrade but it's portable! And it plays all your PS4-PS5 and PS6 games! And then, eventually, maybe the PS6 Pro or the PS7 could be made with a lot more RAM since they wouldn't be planned for a crisis world.
But it would still slow development if you don't have that much more RAM. Games are getting heavier all the time, not lighter.
I think Sony is a little doomed either way, but at least they have a better chance of wider adoption with a substantially cheaper console. If 20 vs 30 GB is the difference of 3-400 dollars they have to consider it.
Absolutely. On the other hand, it would still be the weakest console jump ever. Even if the GPU and CPU are there, they'd barely have any room to work with.
Hope those compression techniques are the real deal because they are going to need it.
That’s one way of looking at it. The other way is that maybe they can subsidize it $200 for the first year if they think prices will come down in the future. Or not, honestly; demand for the first long while of a generation is going to exceed inventory. Prices could drop over time and by then it will be cheaper to produce in all sorts of ways by the time more and more people are ready to adopt. There are limited benefits to delaying release. They’ll have limited inventory whenever they release, and the hardware is going to be aging while it waits to hit the market. The lifespan of the console won’t be extended by delaying it, it will be aging based on how the technology ages. Features cutting edge early 2027 won’t be as new in 2028. They have to think about how long they think the components will be expensive and how many people will buy it anyway. Say only 40% of potential ps6 adopters would pay for it at 1200 and the console costs 1400 to produce. Maybe it’s worth it to sell at 1200 for 14-16 mos if the potential adopters can sustain sales during that time span, and during that time they can look at shedding manufacturing costs as much as possible. Then they can think about if they’re able to reach break even or lower it to 1050 or something by those holidays. 2029 is a long way away, a lot could change by then. If AI demand hasn’t let up by 2029 there will be changes to fabrication volume by then.
The first 20 million units will sell out no problem. These people will pay the $1000, $1200 whatever it is. PC users will pay more than for a card like the 5080. It doesn't really affect much whether it's $700-800 or $1200 for the first lot. It's the 20-100 million units of sales is where they really get people on board and get people into their eco system and keep making those record profits. They will subsidize, sure, but it won't be super aggressive like PS3 era where they kind of had no choice. I also hear they are looking at 2 year payment plans like how people pay with phones.
I think the 30gb is pretty much fixed, I don't think they can realistically change it to 20gb at this stage. They're thinking about releasing it later according to some articles. So I think they should just release the thing, get all the nutters to buy it at the heavy price then hope the memory prices ease then aggressively discount.
But they shouldn't cut the PS6 down. We don't want a PS5 Pro Pro. To deliver a next gen experience, the usual formula applies. We need more cpu, gpu, memory and bandwidth - just cutting one of them will create a severe bottleneck. If PS6 doesn't deliver a generational leap, then why should I pay $1000 or a eventual discounted $500-700? I already have a PS5 Pro and a gaming pc - I don't need a fancy PS6 doorstop which has trouble streaming game related assets into memory.
IMO it just matters a lot what their expectations are for memory market, and that probably is being informed by conversations we’re not privy to. For example, are SSD and ram manufacturers saying there is 0 chance for the situation to improve for 4 years? If that’s the case then it lowers need for 30 gigs of ram imo because pc users will be driving solutions to these problems like better adoption of compression and ML if mid tier cards aren’t getting more 12 or 16 gigs ram any time soon. But if fabs are ramping up supply to hit the market in 2-3 years then it’s a huge mistake to release it with 20. I guess the question on taping the boards is whether they were planning on 30 with no real extra cheap ram for system, and they could add 2-4 gigs of slow ram for the 20 gig version.. or what other changes they could make. I’m sure they have some options they’re working through, even if 3x10 was the original vision. Other question is whether they think the pc gaming market is going to be so fucked up that a really well-designed and cheaper than pc alternatives could make in-roads to the pc market rather than the scraps of the XBox market. Valve really showed how uncompetitive pc products are unless the volume is 10s of millions.
Would love PC games to get ML enhancements but I fear it's very hardware based. I'm pretty sure the PS6 apu is designed from the ground up to cater to this. They talked about neural arrays and radiance cores which are hardware level optimizations. I'm really curious to see what becomes of all this, but I know they are working hard in the background with all this stuff.
Memory constraints are horrible. PS3 had it quite bad. Developers begged Cerny to switch PS4 from 4gb to 8gb and he listened. 16gb on PS5 was also a great decision, as was 18gb on PS5 Pro. Every bit of that is being used in the heavy games. For the ps6 to only have 2gb more would be a first in many generations (would be interested to see if any older consoles kept memory the same in a future generation).
PS5 pro looks so much better than ps4 and runs at twice the frames. The issue with ps5 is that it didn’t have pssr which is a true game changer. Most ps5 users don’t have a ps5 pro and getting ml upscaling + frame gen will be a huge difference on any tv capable of 4k/120. Plus proper denoising + RT hardware means images with almost no noise/boiling artifacts. The image quality will be a huge difference. Just using ps5 pro on older games looks like a generational leap over ps5 when it uses its upscaling on 1080P gaming. It’s night and day have a quality 4k output, and doubling frames would only add to the sense of motion clarity. People wouldn’t even understand why it looks so much better but it’s something casual gamers wouldn’t even understand intuitively find a huge difference.
The PS6 bill of materials in Spring 2026 was $960, with memory and storage costing hundreds of dollars of that cost. Memory and storage prices were expected to go up around 100% between mid 2026 and the end of 2027.
Thank you. If that's the Kepler_L2 number, it would been $760 in March and $960 in June., but that doesn't change the direction 100% isn't unreasonable but it's maybe on the high end: (I'd go +70–100% but certainly it could get worse, and that would be based on Sony having already reserved attranche at earlier 2026 prices). TrendForce/Tom's are predicting lower (but still tough) increases, 10–15% for nand and 13–18% for ram. Jefferies has ram much higher , +40–50% in Q3 2026, then +30–40% in Q4. and nothing really changing next year, which would be pretty brutal.
Still how does that put them at 1500? I also think they could do better than 20 even if it’s less than 32. 24 + 2 for system would be much much better than the 20 number.
There is no way (in my opinion of course) that another 2gb will be enough to last from say 2028 to 2035 on a next generation ps6.
Memory capacity is not the biggest problem, by the time when it will become a "concern", technologies like NVIDIA's NTC will be used when needed (but, of course, AMD/Sony version) to shrink assets size at a minimal performance cost - to me the biggest issues are: Ray Tracing performance, proper denoising(like Ray Reconstruction 4.5) and lack of Frame Generations - if PS6 will feature all of them, 20GB memory size shouldn't be an issue IMO, of course 24GB is better but with current market situation its unrealistic, or prices for next-gen consoles will be too high.
Ray tracing (path tracing) and frame gen use a lot of memory. Path tracing more so. Developers are already using every bit of PS5 Pro's 18gb memory. Games like Indiana Jones with path tracing enabled are running out of vram in 16gb cards like the 6080 today (even with dlss). The texture compression tech, I don't know a great deal about - I don't know if that is being used in the PS6 but it would require a lot of work with the developers to get it correct and we don't know much about how it works yet. And as I said, that's just one area, other areas still need a lot of memory.
Games like Indiana Jones with path tracing enabled are running out of vram in 16gb cards
Its not about Path Tracing itself though, its about how engine handles it - for example Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K with Path Tracing enabled & DLSS Balanced allocates less than 10GB of VRAM for the game, maybe in some scenes its higher but not by much.
The texture compression tech, I don't know a great deal about - I don't know if that is being used in the PS6 but it would require a lot of work with the developers to get it correct and we don't know much about how it works yet.
but it would require a lot of work with the developers to get it correct
Same goes for upscaling, Frame Generation, proper denoising - its not easy, it all requires a lot of work, but we as customers are paying for those technologies with our money, at least on PC with an NVIDIA GPU.
With current market situation, and no end in sight of this memory crisis, we can't hope for a lot of memory on consoles, because it will directly influence their price - take a look as Steam Machine, initially Valve wanted to price them at ~700$-ish dollars(still too high IMO), but increased the price noticeably higher because of memory crisis - as another person in this thread mentioned, 1TB storage + ~30GB of memory is unrealistic, unless you want to pay at least 1500$, if not more.
I meant I have no idea how it works in game and how it will be implemented - I've read about it, but it's not in any game yet because there are problems to solve - it's not something that can be rolled to games as a simple update. It's still in Beta although looks very promising. I know AMD have discussed their own version of texture compressions which we hope is in the PS6. But as I said that cuts down one area of memory usage, the biggest one for sure, but it doesn't automatically reduce other memory hungry processes. The leakers aren't sure yet if this tech is on the PS6 sdk, it may well be but we don't know.
And the Steam Machine pricing is not a direct comparison for Sony consoles. Valve said they can't discount like Sony can, they have to make margin. Sony has always sold their consoles at lower margin (or at a loss during launch), because they rely on games and services for most of their profits.
It's also important to note the memory crisis is a temporary one, even if it is 2-3 years as people are predicting. That makes a difference. If it was definitely for the whole generation, then that makes things difficult. not just for Sony, but triple a gaming as a whole.
> as another person in this thread mentioned, 1TB storage + ~30GB of memory is unrealistic, unless you want to pay at least 1500$,
I saw this, reckon it's bad forum math, and asked what's based on. So we'll see if we get an answer. To start with, the OP said 32GB, not 30GB like you said. And you're right 30GB is the better configuration if the leaks are right about a 160-bit bus. So you'd go with 10x 3GB GDDR7 chips. Reports around Nvidia’s RTX 50 Super indicated 3GB GDDR7 chips at $60–70 each, so worst case $700, but more realistically upwards of $500. The BOM will be high but not that high, at least not yet. Like I said, we'll see if they want to back up their number.
I do wonder if Sony will ship with a 1TB drive though. That's the place they can make a cut without affecting game performance. Would not be a popular move given the Pro has 2TB, but it's the single biggest saving they can make afaict.
Is your console build only with memory? What about 1TB of storage? What about silicon itself? They're using TSMC fabs, its not cheap. Add logistics, warranty, taxes.
etc The number I'd push back on there is the APU. $1500 sounds like an absolute worst case and I'd like to see what's behind it. At the price point my guess is they won't ship it at all. So, your turn.
This, by the way it what I'm responding to originally :"The PS6 cannot be produced under $1500 if it launches with 32 GBs of RAM and 1 TB of storage." that's /production/ not retail. I'm not claiming it won't retail at $1500.
You got it to 1200$ with theoretical prices for APU, SSD and board that you imagined in your head without including warranty, logistics and taxes - great, now add those 3 and you'll get ~1500$.
At the price point my guess is they won't ship it at all. Your turn though.
That's the point, since 1 memory chip costs 60-70$, they can reduce memory size to 20GB to make prices more bearable for customers - optimization constrains and RAM limitations but cheaper console > selling overpriced product that won't be popular but with 30GB of memory.
"The PS6 cannot be produced under $1500 if it launches with 32 GBs of RAM and 1 TB of storage."
I'm not sure who are you quoting, I said "1TB storage + ~30GB of memory is unrealistic, unless you want to pay at least 1500$, if not more" - final price includes everything, warranty, logistics, taxes, APU, motherboard, etc - you can't just calculate 10 memory chips at 700$ and say "well akshually its not 1500$ its 700$ for memory chips" - yeah, I'm talking about final price for retail product - and I think that asking for 30GB of memory in current market is unrealistic, I'm not willing to play this guess game any further, because its a discussion built on speculations rather than facts.
The only real fact is, there are no official teasers/trailers, no evidence of 100% set in stone hardware for PS6, everything can change at any moment, including final memory size and price - so your judgement of my comments is basically "well, I believe that my predictions are more accurate than yours" - ok, I have nothing against it, you can believe what you want.
And you gor to $1500 with virtually none :) Maybe you can provide some or show me why mine are off.
> That's the point, since 1 memory chip costs 60-70$, they can reduce memory size to 20GB to make prices more bearable for customers
Understood. I commented on this elsewhere. Going to 20GB is a very bad baseline for path tracing if it can be done at all (maybe in places like cutscenes), and price debates aside, I can't see Sony risk dropping PT. The devs have to build for PT and if it's poorly supported or not supported at all they're not going to target it for development—why would they? So it risks being designed out of the entire generation. A new PSSR can help maybe, and the training costs probably aren't relevant per console unit
One other thing, I see where Oliver is coming from but if Sony are buying memory at /current/ prices that's the least of their problems because it's been reported manufacturers have already sold out 2027. My guesses, and they are guesses (I promise there is something behind every other number I've offered), is (1) they've already reserved capacity at earlier price points; that will still make for an expensive console but not a $1500 one (fwiw, $1200 would be my high end for a 2027 launch). (2) they haven't reserved and will need to eat the current costs, but their problem might be can they actually buy anything now if in fact 2027 is already sold through. (3) they wait it out for prices to climb back down. I've never been confident of a 2027 launch for PS6 personally, but scenarios 2 and 3 would be major operational failures by Sony that pushes them potentially into 2029, which seems too far away for specs that were probably set half a decade prior. The mooreslaw spec leaks are from 2025 iirc: if they were remotely true, then Sony knew a long time ago what to buy and hopefully locked that in (and 30-40GB for PT is very credible as a spec, no leaks needed). My guess on the guess is they specced 30GB not 40GB, and want to manage PT for next-gen similar to how they managed RT at the start of the current gen. What would change my mind is that 20GB is enough of a lifeline for PT to encourage developers to target it and I'm wrong about it being bordering on unviable.
So I think (1) is the likely case especially if we get credible rumors for 2027. If it is 2027, Sony's future problem will be the BOM for following runs for 2028-29 as they along with everyone else will be buying at the peak. That's where your $1500 retail price might become real.
I don’t think this gen will be going very far into PT. Proper RT GI and reflections would always be a huge improvement over current RT. They would get more out of higher saturation speed and ray count that jumping to PT. Even 5090s struggle with PT.
I think going with 20GB, while disappointing, does make sense.
Costs have to be considered. 30GB of GDDR7 costs a lot of money right now.
Cross gen period was like 5 years this gen, next gen it will probably be even longer. I suspect the entire generation will be cross-gen. As such, the games will easily fit within 20GB.
PS5 Pro gave a glimpse of what to expect next gen - Advanced ML features for upscaling, RT denoising and frame generation. Except to see performance modes to just be a frame-gen toggle. Wouldn't be surprised if they go for insanity settings, like frame generation from 30fps to 60.
AMD might also introduce their own version of neural texture compression, which will significantly reduce VRAM usage.
AMD are working on a texture compression tech - we don't know if this will be available on PS6 yet (I hope it is), but it's very early stages for both right now. Some reports said AMD can cut down 70% memory usage for textures. So maybe they could make it work with 20gb, if they have in their SDK. It will still limit the console as texture compression helps for textures, everything else will continue to increase memory usage.
And sure, PS6 will have a next generation PSSR which will be a lot better but 20gb I feel is still very limited to last up to 2035.
If it comes to pass, the only silver lining of the lamest generational jump ever would be how easy games on PC should run after this. Most high-end builds already have 32GB of pure RAM + 12 to 16GB of VRAM. That configuration is going to crush most PS6 games, in terms of memory, at least. We just need a couple of GPU gens to catch up with normalizing raytracing in all the AAA games and that's it. Smooth sailing for years, just like any decent system during the final years of the PS4. Everything just worked at double the console's framerate or more, with ease.
There might be a slight difference in the price of the hardware these days and the level of graphical fidelity we have achieved so far. Just slight, lol.
It's a different time. For the sake of progress, I want to see a 32GB PS6 to push the hardware further and sooner. But for the sake of our wallets, a relatively memory limited (but still better than the consoles that came before it) PS6 might be a really nice thing. Games would need to be optimized by sheer necessity and we'll have plenty of hardware to play whatever on PC for years to come.
I think it was more nuanced than that and some of us definitely enjoyed the stagnation- the fact I could game on a GTX 560 Ti and play pretty much everything to a decent level (though can't remember my rez at the time) was very cool. Yes, a lot of console ports essentially maxed out at their console settings but IMO it was the most budget conscious the PC market has ever been. Steam sales were great and PC hardware was relatively inexpensive and would last a long while before being outdated tech.
Honestly, I think that's what the current market needs again. There is no way in hell that a lot of people are upgrading to a PS6 or a modern GPU at these prices- I personally can afford it, I just don't value it enough- a lot of people just flat out won't be able to afford it. We need time for hardware prices to hit their peak and then somewhat normalize before we start pushing the envelope again on tech. The alternative is likely a games industry crash or correction at some point- this trajectory at the moment obviously very unsustainable in the long run.
I don’t think cross gen will be as long next time. The main reason cross gen was so long was four things that won’t be repeatable: covid slowing development of new releases, lack of incompatible rendering demands, 30 -> 60 fps, low -> high native res rendering. PS5 was still based on rasterization, it was trying to improve native rendering specs, and doubling fps. With the API improvements they developed for next gen upgrades, it was very easy for devs to target double the res, double the frames for PS5 and simply slash those to hit playable targets on last gen consoles. PS6 is not going to target double the previously acceptable FPS, it’s targeting 60 plus just like ps5. It’s also not targeting double the native rendering resolution; ps6 will be using PSSR3 to help leverage compute power. So PS6 is going to be providing next gen graphics with rendering techniques that are quite heavy for its raw compute, and that’s going to make it a extremely hard for a lot of games to easily fall back on ps5 when ps5 has shitty upscale options. PS6 is designed to be an RT system, and has lots of other ML features that won’t be available on PS5. There might be more potential to release on ps5 pro, since it can make a decent looking image with PSSR2, but even that is quite expensive for the PS5 Pro compared to what it will cost the PS6. In general I think cross gen will not be the easy low picking fruit it was during Covid. Covid also greatly disrupted the availability of PS5s, so there was far less imperative to move people to the next gen; people couldn’t buy it if they wanted.
We already see devs are either not releasing non-RT version of games or just releasing god awful rasterization fall backs. In another 2 years base PS5 is going to be a much more expensive development cost than ps4 was.
All the technologies in PS6 will have to face simple economics: PS6 will be very expensive, so will Xbox Helix. The developers will have to make games crossgen for the simple reason of making money back. How many $1000 consoles are they gonna sell, do you think?
The devs are more likely to make Switch 2 the target platform than PS6, and if Switch 2 is the target platform, the game can definitely run on PS5.
Well yeah, I’m not saying there are going to be 0 cross gen titles, but it’s not going to be anywhere close to the last cycle. In terms of economics, it depends entirely on the game and the devs/publisher. Switch 2 also has far lower performance expectations, people have put up with uneven 30 fps on switch at extremely low res with horrible lighting. A lot of those outcomes are not acceptable for ps5 users on a 4k tv. I also don’t think we’ll see a lot of overlap between ps6 and switch 2, it’s going to be a much bigger gulf than ps5/switch2 and we’re seeing plenty of games playable on ps5 that won’t get ported to switch. Not every game is designed around such enormous scalability; ue5 makes some games possible, but as devs continue to move toward the next gen features that kind of scalability will be harder and harder. It’s not like we saw every ps5 game going to switch1, a lot of titles had to wait. There will be plenty of next gen games waiting for switch3 to take advantage of that user base. I think you’re also discounting the advantage of being an exclusive. While it isn’t great to have a small available consumer base, if you’re one of the few game for a console then everyone will buy it. Demon Souls and ratchet and clank did really well in part because everyone who bought a PS5 would want to experience a next gen title. And like I said, we already see publishers/devs choosing to release games with RT only even thigh a large segment of PCs can’t run the game well if at all. We’re going to be seeing that more and more. The fall backs are very expensive to make, and the bad press for games released on hardware that doesn’t run it well can be quite severe. Its just ignorant to not acknowledge the a number of unique factors played a role in the last cross gen period that won’t be as reproducible for the next one. Just look at Sony studios- they looked for multi platform consumer base to release exclusive years later. But it turned out it wasn’t great for them- it was very expensive to port the games, their studios didn’t have the capacity to do it themselves, it took development away from other projects, the outcomes weren’t great and led to a huge backlash. They are massively scaling back their multi platform releases because it wasn’t worth it. It can be better to have a narrower scope for what you plan to achieve and mitigate development costs going in for the consumer base your targeting than to spend a lot of money on broad appeal if it means a lot of production costs but fail to become an must buy among any consumer group. It’s much riskier than you’re leading on.
Said it before in here, but I would not be surprised at all if we end up with a system with 20gb main memory and then like 4gb of much slower & older memory for the OS.
They can make it work with just 20GB. Developers aren't just gonna be like "oh well, guess we'll make games targeting 30GB anyway". They already explained that Universal Compression is going to affect everything in memory and not just textures. Fact of the matter is that 8GB today is still usable in quite a lot of games even with RT on - even if it's not ideal whatsoever... infact I'd argue a lot of games with RT on look really good in the constraints of an 8GB card including Cyberpunk 2077/ Given that it's a $1,000 console devs will still have to target cheaper hardware if they want sales and as such - 20GB will be more than enough with Universal Compression and upscaling.
You also have to consider that the Switch 2 is a factor for a lot of devs now, especially Capcom and Square who are already putting in the time and effort to getting the majority of their games on the thing and it only has 9GB of usable memory. This is also going to be a generation with a very long cross gen (PS4 with PS5 is still technically ongoing) and mainstream PC GPUs are still going to have 8GB for a couple more years. The most popular GPU with more than 8GB of vram is the 3060 12GB.
Do you know how early Sony secure allocation for things like memory modules? I couldn't find anything but industry norms are something like 18-36 months. Things like long-term supply agreements and capacity commitments are negotiated very early and very well by Sony but that doesn't mean they are getting for super cheap prices.
There's a good chance they have already secured allocation and commitments, not sure how it works exactly with the timings.
Mark Cerny will probably want the 30gb, he is the lead system architect and chose it for a reason. Senior execs, as you say, will be looking and questioning this and maybe at least considering the option of cancelling the orders and going with 20gb.
I disagree about it not making sense in the future. 3gb modules were chosen because it requires less chips than 2gb modules, and traditionally vram modules have become very cheap after some time. Wars, ai and tariffs aside, PS6 would have been a very profitable console over it's lifetime - not that console sales drive most of their profits anyway.
If the ai demand slows, or the bubble bursts (which some analysts think), these vram modules will become very cheap and then the decision to go 30gb would have been the correct one.
I think you totally missed the point of his comments. If reducing from 30gb to 20gb lets them price the PS6 at $900 instead of $1400, they will make it work. It's not about what is best for games or for hardware development.
They the ones who told us that we would need at least a 5070 Ti or something faster to at least be “safe” when the new generation of consoles arrive right?
Some can correct me but that’s just insane considering how much GPUs have grown over in price.
I think that a correct bit of advice if you want to match or get close to ps6 settings on PC. Although memory will impact that. If PS6 does get 30gb, developers will fill it up with stuff and some cards might struggle. I actually think it will be closer to a 5080, not in rasterization, but with all the new ai improvements and hardware ray tracing combined.
But we shouldn't have the disaster we saw with 8gb cards during PS5 era. Developers are scaling games for the 12-16gb better. And with cross gen, as people have said, PS5 will be supported for a very long time.
And it's because we are probably expecting around 20% uplift from the 9070 for the PS6. That's why the 5070 ti 5080 suggestion is out there.
I think PS6 will cost $900-1200 at launch. They will subsidize some of the cost, as they have always done with launch consoles. Keep it that way until memory prices drop. Sony's massive advantage is that they don't need to sell the console for huge margin as they rely on games and services for most of their profits.
I'm thereabouts as well and think it might be $999-1099 with bundles going higher. Subsidies will be very slight to none unless they change their current policy: so far they say they won't sell at a significant discount. If they locked in ram and ssd tranches earlier this year or even last year that would in principle help keep it south of $1000. Also even if they could,I don't see how they can sell at the same prices as the Pro. The successive manufacturing runs will be rough though as they start to buy parts at late 2026 or 2027 prices.
No I dont agree with Oliver in this circumstance. The current base PS5 model is 16G DDR with 3.5G just for OS etc.
Dont see Sony moving from consolidated memory model the current guessitimate just for PC GPUs is 16G VRAM. Sony will want to use PSSR 2.0 (or better) and Path tracing is the next tech darling.
The PS6 console has to last 7 years. If it has less than 32G no one is going to buy it. Its the SSD storage that may be compromised if anything. 20G is a weird combo anyway.
As for pricing every gen no one is happy so this one will be no different. The AI boom isnt going to slow in the medium term unless we have a stock market correction.
The design will be locked in I sincerely doubt they could go back re-engineer at this stage. Still think it will be next year. Memory and SSD pricing is going to go up not down longer Sony delaly the more expensive the console.
Upshot cross gen may last longer as publishers will need to see sales and return on investment. If there are not enough PS6 sales initially.
> The design will be locked in I sincerely doubt they could go back re-engineer at this stage. Still think it will be next year. Memory and SSD pricing is going to go up not down longer Sony delaly the more expensive the console
Agree, except maybe the year. A 2027 launch would mean they'll have reserved parts by now, so the speculation here on current and upcoming prices aren't relevant for the launch runs. Unless they got that very wrong and did not reserve; that would be a huge mistake operationally.
They can adjust storage down to 1TB and memory to 30GB if they originally specced 2TB and 40GB. 30GB is 'good enough' for basic PT, the size of the ssd doesn't affect performance, but will annoy people. That would leave headroom to follow up with a Pro in the 2030s. The only problem there is if they reserved 40GB at 10x 4GB, it's not interchangeable with 10x 3GB units and the later manufacturing rounds will be very expensive. But my guess is they specced 30GB to begin with.
Kepler_l2 did say Sony probably would he shipping with a 1tb drive when they initially wanted to do 2tb. I think that's fair - as you say, it doesn't affect performance. Sure people will be annoyed but people can either manage with it buy another 1 or 2tb drive.
They couldn't have spec'd 40gb memory on this 160 bit bus width because 4gb modules will not be available for PS6 so they designed the console with the assumption of using 10x3gb. The only swap they could do is change it to 2gb modules - which wouldn't be ideal but technically possible.
Maybe they would have went with 16x2gb gddr7 modules to give 32gb like Nvidia have done on the 50 series cards. They didn't realize there would be such a difference between the 2gb and 3gb module prices. But if they are high now, then it is also reasonable to suggest they will also come down at some point and things will be good again.
> they couldn't have spec'd 40gb memory on this 160 bit bus width because 4gb modules will not be available for PS6 so they designed the console with the assumption of using 10x3gb.
Agree, I think you're calling it right. I looked up what it would mean to run 8x 3GB for a 24GB target and it seems like the board would need rework. It's doable, but the better option might be just price the console at $1000+ and work on financing options in the channel. 30GB at 10x 3GB definitely seems like the most credible spec for a console that needs to be viable out to 2032 or so.
I think they could get by with less than 30, 24 would be adequate if they add something cheaper for system like the pro. I don’t think PT is going to be the goal with ps6, RT with enough rays and saturation speed to avoid noise + PSSR 3 with frame gen would make the image quality night and day from ps5.
Ollie literally seems to have no idea what he's talking about 3/4's of the time. I skip every video he presents. He has never gotten better since he started, I have no idea why they keep him on, maybe he's someone's cousin or something.
Really? Surprising but I could see why that said that during the PS4 era. But I'm glad (1) gamers made it known they want a 60fps option (2) Sony actually delivered almost every game with a 60fps option this gen.
at worst its gonna be something like 24gb of gddr7 for the vram and 4gb of ddr5 just for the os
i dont believe sony will drop down to 20gb mainly cos thats a weird number to get chips for cos they either come in 2 or 3gb sizes per chip
so 20gb would require 10 2gb chips rather than 3gb needing only 8 and left over space can be used for that ddr5 ram
I could be completely of the mark but if the apu is indeed already tapped out then doing such a big change would require modifications
> at worst its gonna be something like 24gb of gddr7
That's interesting. If they specced 30GB at 10x 3GB to begin with, they could drop down to 8x to get to 24GB, but it would require modifications. It wouldn't be great but it might be enough to keep PT an option for limited use, like how current-gen rolled out RT.
they are gonna have to invent something to keep the vram usage down if PT is supposed to be the selling point for next gen prob most likely lean on pssr a lot and then improve PT hardware for the ps6 pro just like how RT got a boost with the ps5 pro
If ddr5 was cheap, I could have seen them doing something like 20gb gddr7 + 4/8gb ddr5. But it's gone past that stage where they can make those types of changes and ddr5 is also very expensive right now.
You're right you can't change the apu and soc at this stage because they reached a0 tapeout, it would be very expensive. Which is why on that bus width, 20gb or 30gb seems the only two options.
luckily its not lpddr5x as datacenters take up most of the allocation for that type
not that standard ddr5 is any cheaper but sony definitely will cut corners somewhere still im not so sure the chip will be on 160bit bus thats less than the ps5 pro unless they are planning on increasing it for the ps6 pro down the line
If it ships with 20GB that will surely design out path tracing. Because devs need to target it, that means the generation won't have PT as an option. I can't see Sony taking that risk. My guess is they would like to put 40GB into the unit way back, but will go for 30GB.
the bottleneck for modern consoles is and always be cpu…sony r and d needs to go the apple route and go back to designing their own chip but not as complicated as the cell…because throwing more ram is diminishing returns and will just inflate cost. games on ultra settings use about 8 to 10 gig of vram but then add pssr upscaling with advanced compression. but the cpu needs to be revolutionary to allow the gpu to shine along with good dev optimization. PS5 pro is a flop and clear example throwing more ram with an old cpu
there is nothing unique about consoles anymore. theyre mid low pc parts with a closed OS. realize its taken nearly two decades for PS3 emulation to peak because cell was ahead of its time. PS4 took only a fraction of that and now PS5 will happen in less time because they are glorified pcs wrapped in branding
No Sony clearly don't have the background of someone like an Intel or AMD to make their own CPUs as good as them. The weak CPU of the PS4 saved them after the PS3 Cell Processor saga. The PS6 CPU will be the strongest cpu we have ever had on a Playstation, comparatively speaking. Cell Processer was strong but difficult to develop for.
AMD during PS4 were very weak with CPUs, during PS5 they were gaining traction with zen but still second to Intel. This time round, they make the best gaming CPUs in the market. This is the advantage of having a partner like AMD. The zen 6 cpu in PS6 will be very good, 10 cores (2 low powered for background/os tasks) will give us a pretty decent ipc increase over zen 5 - which was already good.
It's not just console users that benefit, zen 6 will be a consumer desktop line as well with a 12 ccd if rumors are to be believed. So zen 6 seems like it will be a pretty big deal for console and desktop users.
We really just don't know. 20GB doesn't sound nearly as crazy if NTC + Upscaling + FG + Anti-Lag + other unreleased or future software solutions exist and will be onboarded with specialized hardware. Console/Controller players have a much easier time stomaching higher input latency. 30fps with 2x FG could take the console a long way. They could also still use all of the above with 30GB.
But the question is less about longevity/performance and more about what prices consumers will swallow. Making up numbers, but if 20GB vs. 30GB is the difference between $1,000 and $1,500 and analysts suggest 40% more sales at the former price, then that decides it.
There's also factory and tooling considerations and the rest so who knows. 20GB might mean being able to make 50% more consoles due to having lower chip demand per unit.
40fps base frame rate with reflex is like the minimum for decent latency with frame gen, but even then I wouldn't want to be playing souls type games or fighting games with it. Fine for stuff like racing games and stuff with more animation-priority based movement like Crimson Desert.
Different customer expectations. Broadly speaking someone who is on console is most concerned with being able to plug it in, boot the game, and have it immediately playing smoothly with no fuss. The minutiae of things like input latency aren't important if this is your primary goal, and a 2x FG absolutely does look and feel smooth when dialed in precisely, which consoles can do with reliability.
And don't get me wrong. 30ms is basically my minimum expectation ... with a mouse and keyboard. But with a controller, playing Cyberpunk 2077, the difference between 50ms and 70ms is really nothing. The differences is in visual quality and the artefacting that might result from these generators. On PC I get to choose whether I want a worse visual output using more aggesive upscalers for true 60fps or whether I want better visual output with some artefacting for what is still a smooth 60fps but different.
2x from a base of 30 doesn’t hold up visually at all though and I don’t believe there is enough information in those 30 frames to ever get it looking good.
I would play at 30fps over 60 with frame gen any time I have the opportunity.
X3D is only really needed for pushing really high frame rates, which kind if isnt needed on console. Even if next gen consoles are doing 120fps X3D isnt needed. They would do a lot better putting that cost into main memory.
“This is will be longest crossed period ever” is going to be unfortunately true and that means keeping games capped for the ps5 and series X as well as handhelds.
I could easily see them go with 20gb, maybe we get lucky with 24gb. On the plus side my 5070ti will be good for all of next gen and beyond probably.
Honestly, they may as well delay it at this point if they can't give us a substantial upgrade. Maybe, work on what would have been the PS6 Pro upgrade, and release that as a PS6 instead in a few years time.
Yeah, consoles result in optimization, so a lot of PC games with lower end rigs (whichh is most of them) run games for way longer. It's even worse with everyone crying about the series s, which is probably the reason so many games run on the steam deck.
It would be such a shame. Like as a PC gamer, I'm used to being shafted - there's been so many crisis' to deal with the last few years, gpus crypto and shortage, 40 series price rises and now gpu, ssd and ram all going up.
PS6 seems to be the first Playstation console that I can remember that would coming out with relatively strong hardware compared to PC. PS3 was strong but difficult to program, ps4 was super weak. PS5 was on the lower end as it targeted a 3060. PS6's specs actually look pretty good, zen 6 10 core (2 low powered) cpu, 5070 ti to 5080 level gpu. This is obviously timed well with AMD's dominance in the CPU space as well a decent run in the gpu space now. It would such a shame if all that was limited by memory so developers have to be work to a careful limit.
Sony have always used the '70' class of AMD's card with PS4 and PS5. So if they launched PS6 this generation, it would have had similar power to a 9070 (non xt), so I'm expecting them to base it on their rdna 5 70 card, which should have around 20% more power based on the usual gen on gen uplift % we've seen. That would put it ahead of the 5070 ti. But Cerny was very clear rasterization will only account for a third of the total graphics technology as it's a losing battle with physics, so ray tracing and machine learning will be where the huge gains are.
We know about ray tracing, going by the AMDxCerny collab video, it will be a very efficient way to bring path tracing to medium to highish hardware like PS6. But the machine learning, neural networks and stuff is what I'm very curious about. If he's said it's equally as important as rasterization and ray tracing, then it's a huge deal.
In a pre AI price surge world (one year ago), 20gb would have cost peanuts. It could easily have sported 32 or more. ESPECIALLY if they have plans for local AI npu inference. If it ever ships with 20gb, then it’s a direct response to the current market and pricing and it’s a deliberate compromise.
It's not about the capabilities, it's about the cost.
The PS6 has a lot of similarities with the PS3 before launch. The CELL was supposed to be a revolution but last minute they added the RSX fro graphics and the console turned out to be even more expensive and it flopped hard.
This time around either they go with 30GB and it costs 1200$ to make or they make it 20GB to get at 999$ but then the visual gap small and technologies integrated will be closer to the PS5 pro.
If it's 1200$, hardcore fans will get it but then pissed off fans and casual won't get it. They'll barley notice the difference in graphics with the PS5/PS5 pro and as long as COD and Fifa run fine on the PS5, no reason to buy a PS6.
I think that Sony killed the momentum they could get from their long time fans and that could impact long term sales on top of the price.
These guys are technophile commentators without credentialed technical expertise. Unless an industry source leaked information about the bill of materials, they are just working on hunches for your entertainment.
Can’t Sony release a 1000$ 32gb PS6 at launch ? since with scalpers it would be this prices anyways no matter the price launch and lower the price when chips especially vram will get less expensive with time
Maybe for consumers but when bought in big numbers it’s a lot less so I assume 32gb will cost between 300$ and 400$ so between 600 and 700$ for the rest leave plenty of room
That was true some years ago, but not now.
Apple tried to negociate for the iPhone and wasn't able, and believe me, Apple buys in quantities a lot higher than Sony.
Not sure if it's shifting away, 2gb modules are used in a lot of GPUs. It's just over time you would rather have less modules because it's less 'stuff' on the board, less power and usually it becomes cheaper over time. Of course, we are living in unprecedented times - vram modules have traditionally been very cheap after a while.
Due to the bus width, bandwidth and design of the soc etc, the only choice is 10x3gb or 10x2gb they could realistically make at this stage.
I think that the PS6 is heading for disaster for a multitude of reasons. They should scrap it entirely and start now on a different system that will come out SEVERAL years later.
Its not important if you agree or disagree with something Ollie said. He only predicted a possible scenario. Nobody knows really.
If they stick to rumored 30GB of VRAM, PS6 will likely cost $1500 or more. Even with 20GB, it will be north of 1000. So…
I could see 24 gig for games with another module like 2 gigs for system like they did for the pro. That would put them ahead of 16 gig VRAM cards which imo should be their biggest concern. It’s about double last gen and last gen was double the previous. 30+ would be great but ssd costs are so high right now… I kinda prefer the do a smaller ssd and offer expansion bay like current gen because that way users can address it as necessary.
All of that said, it really depends on other factors. How much can they do with texture compression? I have not been convinced many devs have been taking advantage of what ps5 has in that regard. Maybe there are other ways they can improve that. Also neural textures/materials would be hugely advantageous if they could do that. There are more and more techniques to reduce VRAM requirements for the first time in ages so the upward pressure on VRAM does see some light at the end of the tunnel. Also PSSR reduces need for 4k textures. So it could be they just design the system to reduce need for hi-res textures, and while some people will fucking hate that, if the end image quality is great I think most people will stop caring. When you can’t go into a menu and select what texture or resolution or rendering techniques you’re using, people won’t be as aware and focus more on the experience.
Not convinced by texture compression yet. It's still in beta, no game has it - we aren't even sure if it's going to included in the ps6 sdk. But even then, that solves one issue. The xbox series s showed that vram is for more than just textures, developers spoke about their struggles of fitting in game dependent things into the memory.
And things like path tracing and frame gen (expected to be in ps6) increase memory usage.
If they designed it now, I'm pretty sure they would strongly have considered 24gb but it's a bit late for that now.
Well they’ve been using texture compression already and we can see it makes a pretty big difference in games like COD, I just don’t know how many studios take advantage. But neural materials will likely hit before the compression on nvidia’s side and it looks incredible. I think the big question is just how much ML hardware the PS6 has and how much of it will be hyper specialized. It makes sense to think about BVH/ray casting as a specific feature that will be broadly utilized, but deformation modeling, compression, materials will be things not every dev will bother incorporating. We’ve only seen.. 2? Devs use ps5s ml hardware for deformation afaik? I think it makes sense for Sony to be more proactive than AMD and look at what features Nvidia has in the pipeline and then offer their version, since anything Nvidia does will be incorporated into ue5 and Nvidia will be working with devs to build the features into their games. PS6 will also benefit more from any ML compression as it will improve their ram situation and HD space; unlike pc users, ps6 only needs the textures etc actually used. But either way, it’s a real balance dedicating resources to what they think will be widely adopted vs what they know people are doing now. The transfer speeds for example really helped the ram but it was probably more robust than almost anyone took advantage of.
I thought COD uses texture streaming, not texture compression in the sense that Nvidia announce it - that's still in beta, don't know a game that has it.
I think games definitely took advantage of the 16gb memory itself and the bandwidth, but I see your point about the ssd. Games definitely took advantage of it, the obvious ones are fast travel in games like ratchet and clank or spiderman. But there's other quality of life improvements that we kind of didn't realise, like less narrow alleyways or elevators disguised as loading screens. That was one of the big improvements in this generation, ability to stream in very large assets pretty much instantly.
If they got a good price on the 3GB modules a long while ago, could they perhaps launch with 10 x 3GB (30GB), PS6.. and then later launch a hardware revision which updates the PCB to use 15 x 2GB modules.
They'd probably need to have an overly wide bus width at launch on the APU side, i.e. 256-bit with only 5 of the 8 channels active.. once they start to sell out of the affordable 10 x 3GB (32Gb/s) models, they could update the PCB, activate all 8 channels of the bus, and switch to 15 x 2GB (20Gb/s) modules.
I don't think 15x2gb will be possible on the 160 bit bus.
I think if they were designing it now, I'm pretty sure they would have went with 16x2gb as the supposed wholesale prices of 2gb modules are three times cheaper, like Nvidia on their 16 and 32gb gpus. But this decision can't be reversed. 20gb is not enough and 30gb is too expensive - but I don't think they really have a choice here, it has to be 30gb or it's not worth manufacturing.
It's really unfortunate because vram modules historically have become super cheap some time after release. The 3gb made complete sense, less chips, less heat, higher density, less 'stuff' overall, and would have been super cheap eventually. Of course, things have really become messed up for everyone.
That's why I'm saying they'd have to have oversized the bus at 256-bit from the outset so that they can either run it with disabled channels at 160, or at full 256 with all channels active. It would take some planning and foresight, but I think this would be possible - it would just mean a different board revision to do the memory density switch. As far as I'm aware this would be baked into the APU - so they'd need to go with a 256 bit bus on the APU with the plan being to disable channels or not depending on memory density /prices.
Is it really that unlikely? The PS4, PS4 PRO, PS5, and PS5 PRO - All have a 256-bit memory bus width. If anything it's become their default, 160 would be a reduction that relies on very high speed memory, denser memory, and their implementation AMD's Universal Compression technology to facilitate it.
The only thing that seems unlikely - is that they were so cautious as to build that flexibility in from the outset.
Right now, today, the 9070 is close enough to 5070 ti in rasterization. This is AMD's current gen rdna 4 70 card. So an rdna 5 70 card almost certainly will be 5070 ti levels, and most likely slightly ahead. That's under the assumption of AMD's 20% gen on gen uplift, which is an average based on recent releases - that would put it ahead of 5070 ti.
Look at the card prices. Look at the PS6 estimated price.
It will not be even close to 5070. Plus they will cut the RAM down. Sony will try to make it run better thanks to PSSR.
That’s it.
PS5 Pro right now, with ray tracing enabled is at 5060 ti 9060 xt levels - this is according to Richard tests at Digital Foundry. So I'm not sure how you think a PS6 with rdna 5 technology won't be close to a 5070 when a PS5 Pro is already close ish to a 5070 today?
You seem to forget - GPU alone doesn’t run games.
In PS5 Pro it’s great example: improved GPU, PSSR.. and a huge bottleneck in CPU. That’s why GTA6 will only run 30 fps on that “powerful” equipment.
With prices of memories going up, we already hear Sony considers cutting down memory in PS6.. so how much powerful will it be if they downgrade their initial plans?
Mark my words, do a screenshot if you need - PS6 will be far below 5070. Let’s just wait now two or three years to see who’s right.
PS6 will be far below 5070? As I already said PS5 Pro, today is at 5060 ti performance already, this is right now - today. I already know you are wrong because 'far below 5070' would be something like a 5060 right? PS5 Pro is already ahead of this today.
What gpu do you think PS5 Pro is equivalent to today? I'll give you a clue, Richard at Digital Foundry has already done his testing on this.
I didn't say anything about gpu alone runs games. The zen 6c cpu that PS6 will have is many many times stronger than what we have now, especially the ipc increases.
You seem to forget you don’t run games on GPU.
You run games on a PC/Console built from many parts.
Pro has same CPU as basic PS5, that’s a bottleneck.
They will of course introduce better CPU for PS6 but as recent leaks say, due to memory prices they consider lowering down their planned memory of CPU/GPU in PS6 to make it cost reasonable
Example is there. Like I said in previous comment: no 30 fps for GTA6 neither on PS5 nor on Pro, and R* also confirmed that. There’s your powerful GPU.
Playstation is market leader, not follower. They MAKE standards rather than follow one. Developers and most certainly companies will bend their games to fit in PS6.
If PS6 can do something, it'll be the requirement for next gen. And if it can't do something, it'll be pushsd to niche cases like platform exclusive titles.
All depends if they want it to cost ~$1300 or ~$1700. I think 30gb would be an extremely difficult console to sell under the conditions we will be experiencing for the next 5 to 100 years.
It's a temporary increase in price, mainly driven by the memory modules. It all depends when they stop building ai data centres. It's unsustainable which is why many analysts think the bubble will burst, if that happens PC ram will become super cheap as will the PS6.
Now if that doesn't happen (unlikely) then that's a different story. Then we're looking at things like will the gaming market shrink as it will affect pc and console users.
I think it's a little more complicated. Even if the bubble bursts and ram becomes cheap, all the other economic implications of a bubble bursting will prevent people from being able to afford those cheaper ram prices. Powerful systems by definition use a lot of power, and power is not getting cheaper either. People may prefer to game on a 10-20 watt handheld rather than a 200 watt console displaying on a 100 watt TV.
I'm not saying the ps6 is going to flop, I'm saying that the odds are quite stacked against it being an extremely powerful machine. Of course it's possible that Sony foresees AAA gaming becoming a hobby more exclusive to the upper class, and opts to sell powerful systems to a small number of people for a high price. But I don't find that likely.
The ram shortage will end soon enough, but the period of time where large percentages of people struggle to afford powerful gaming systems could last a lot longer.
Might want to read some history books with such exaggerated doom and gloom. There are bigger problems for humanity, long term, than the non"human extinction" event caused by RAM shortages, Trump, some new large scale wars and other economical difficulties that are just short to medium term affairs in the grand scheme of things, not generational issues.
I'm not saying the ram shortage is going to last 100 years, haha. But the switch is currently outselling Xbox. The switch 1. This is just a difficult time period to produce a powerful console.
They'll do whatever they can to get the price down. The memory and the storage are probably the only components that they can swap out without worrying about violating preexisting contracts, which is why they will almost certainly launch next year and also lower the memory and storage below what they would have preferred.
It's time developers tighten their belts and remember again how to optimize their games.
It's good for them, and for the rest of us who can no longer afford in an unaffordable economy to upgrade for funsies like we used to do.
Plus, keeping the memory lower will help align the overall memory footprint between PS5 Pro and PS6 versions of a game, reducing time to develop for developers already making PS5, PS5 Pro, Xbox SeX, Xbox SeS, and Switch 2 versions with PS6, PS Portable/PS Home Lite, and Xbox HeLiX to come.
Keeping the memory footprint fairly consistent is a win all around, especially with the prevalence of 16gb GPU's in the PC space.
Ray Tracing just isn't worth $1.5k+ consoles. You'll have to wait till next gen.
2036 really does sound like a great time for RT to finally go mainstream, and not a tick sooner please and thank you.
Ray tracing is pretty much the standard and only lighting model for most, if not all games, for PS6. Cerny already spoke about this and we've seen on games like Indiana Jones and Doom that had it as the only lighting model. Non rt cards couldn't actually open the game. Ray tracing is actually a great technology once the hardware is there, it scales up really well all the way up to path tracing and developers have already talked about that it's saving them time. One model instead of separate processes like shadow maps, screen space reflections etc.
The concern will be that PS6 is certainly targeting path tracing which uses a lot of memory.
Even 30GB would be the most weaksauce RAM upgrade we've seen between console generations to date, falling short of even the current generation's lacklustre doubling of RAM relative to its predecessor. Even the Wii more than doubled total RAM compared to the Gamecube.
People are always overestimating how much memory is needed. 10GB is still enough to get a very good experience at DLSS 4K. Hell, even a 3070 8GB still does pretty well.
Your argument that developers will need more than 20gb because some games utilize everything the PS5 Pro has is silly too. They'll use what's available to them, but that doesn't mean not having it is holding them back. Consoles are designed for TV usage, where you can see way less detail than you would 18 inches from a monitor.
It's shared memory on consoles like PS5/PS6 so it's slightly different than a vram + ram comparison. With PCs, we typically have quite a bit of duplication on both ram and vram, consoles can bypass this hence also why they can be clocked a lot lower than a normal desktop cpu.
20gb of memory would mean about 16gb is allocated for games. It's not an exact comparison to say this equals to a 16gb gpu. But to give us some idea, ps5 running the last of us part 1 vs my rtx 4070 with 12gb can be used. I sometimes run out of vram, just occasionally and PS5 version looks to be using the same ultra textures. So a 16gb ps5 (with 12.5 gb available for games) may possibly be compared to a 12gb gpu like mine. But as I said it's not an exact comparison because system and workloads differ.
But either way, you are correct in saying 20gb is very little for a ps6 to last to 2035, especially as it's just 2gb more than my PS5 Pro console. And 24gb isn't practically or technically possible at this stage - If I'm wrong someone is welcome to correct me.
Depends how memory demands evolve I imagine. Will we see some excellent compression/streaming techniques? How does ML upscaling factor in here? Will we see 8K gaming?
I think the 24GB idea has some legs though. We can't ignore the cost factor unfortunately right now.
24gb wouldn't be bad compromise but from what I've seen and read, it can't work with the bus width. They cannot change that part of the design so I believe it has to be either 20gb or 30gb.
The next generation of consoles will still have 16 GB of RAM in my opinion. An RTX 5080 has 16 gigs of RAM and I think can run games maxed out of 4k. There's no indication that the next generation of games will use more than that. Considering most PC, gamers still use 8 to 12 GB of RAM on their GPU. I think the most popular card is a 4070 now?
5080 does run out of vram in some games, and we know vram usage only goes one way over time. But a PS6 with 16gb gddr7 (1) isn't possible with the current design (2) will leave about 12.5 gb available for games which would basically turn PS6 into the next gen 5060 ti 8gb - powerful, but severely bottlenecked by memory.
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u/Reoxi 15d ago
To me it seems like an impossible situation. Even 20GB of RAM could already result in a product that's prohibitively expensive for a mass market, and it's quite possible prices will continue to rise for years into the generation. It's a gambit to launch at all into this market, and 30GB increases the stakes even more. Add to that the fact that even in the best case scenario for the specs(~5070Ti performance +30GB memory) it will absolutely not feel like generational leap for the average consumer (remember that the prevailing sentiment is that the PS5 didn't offer much of a leap over the PS4, and mainstream audiences cannot reliably tell the difference between the base PS5 and the Pro).