Third-party devs surprised by PS4’s 8GB memory

Sony kept all but its closest studios in the dark about its decision to give the PS4 8GB GDDR5 RAM, says Just Add Water CEO Stewart Gilray.

Gilray’s studio already had their dev kit, and was working on a secret title for the new console, but didn’t find out about the real specs until the unveiling on February 20th.

"We were told [PS4] was 4GB originally and we first knew it had 8GBs when Mark said at the event’s stage, ‘And it has 8GB of memory.’ We’d had kits at that point for a good while," Gilray told Videogamer.

While it is likely that "a couple of really close first-parties" knew about the 8GBs before the event, Gliray says that "most third-parties, were in the dark and happy with 4GB.

One of the benefits of the additional memory is that Sony has fenced in its system memory so that developers don’t have to worry about it.

"When you press the PlayStation button on a PS3 game, you get the basic XMB up [but] to do anything you have to quit the game, because of the memory for it," said Gilray.

"With PS4 we don’t have that because the system memory is already ring-fenced for itself."

"It’s a fantastic amount of memory, especially DDR5 memory, because it’s so fast you don’t have to have everything there at once," he explained.

"You can swap it in and out instantly, effectively. But when they said 8GB it was like, ‘Ooookay.’"