Why do consoles have so little memory compared to classic computers?
Someone asked on Game Development:
I remember the Playstation having 2MB ram and 1MB graphic memory.
The Playstation 3 now has only 256MB ram and 256MB graphic memory, and I’m sure that the day the console was released, even laptop’s “standard” capacity was at least 1GB.
So why do they put so little memory in their machines, while developers would benefit a lot by having more ? Or is the memory that much faster than desktops and thus more expensive ? Or is it not that much worth it for developers ? What are the Sony/XBox/Nintendo engineers thinking that seems to be the same reason ?
I posted the following answer, which was chosen as the accepted answer and received 9 upvotes:
As @AttackingHobo said, the memory is very fast and expensive. Also, you must take into account that these consoles launched years ago, when memory and hardware prices were higher.
Another factor that goes into making consoles very performant on what appears to be very limited resources, is that since every console is identical, we as developers can take advantage of platform specific optimizations. On a PC you can’t do that as much, and thus you are required to have a beefer PC so it can brute-force its way through a similar unoptimized task.
That isn’t to say there is no optimization in PC games, but it is in different areas than consoles, and in general due to the wide range of supported hardware, it is less effective.
Originally posted on Game Development — 9 upvotes (accepted answer). Licensed under CC BY-SA.
