This generation is the smallest increase in RAM between ever afaik. With RAM prices not really decreasing im not sure i blame them for being conservative.
I think a big factor in this decision is that ram is not as important as how quickly data can be moved. The SSDs take much of the work away, and new compression techniques will things even lighter.
The other factor is that games themselves, are not growing in size exponentially. Games and their assets are not likely to be ten times the size they were of the previous generation. In many cases because the asset quality is mostly... good enough for photorealistic or near-photorealistic visuals. Racing games are perhaps a good example, where I suspect it's likely that the vehicle models will actually shrink in size on next gen systems (same models + new compression) when compared to current.
But I hear what you're saying. 1GB of ram is a lot, when you only have 16 in total, and it does seem like a lot just for the 4k system level menu, so I could see them wanting to reserve that for games.
You dont think anyone is looking for controversy? Lol
You previously referenced a slippery slope of increasingly lowering the res of the ui to free up even more resources. And now you're inviting the counter point of the slippery slope of increasingly taking resources away from games to make a UI fancier. You do realize this device is used primarily to play games, right? How much is too many resources to take away from games?
In a world where gamers choose a smaller, monochrome screen as their portable of choice because it had the best games should be all the evidence we need to know what is important.
Well, principally if you design your system level user experience, and gameplay experience semi-independently, then you shouldn't be taking anything from the other.
Neither the game, or the system should be fighting each other for RAM, or any other resource.
For instance, you might outline early on in some concept stage, that you want your user experience to have, a party chat, a 4k interface, a video recording feature. So, you say you need 4GB of ram to make that happen, fine. Separate to that, you might say, you need 12GB of ram to perform well in modern games for the next 5+ years.
And then, you allocate 16GB of ram, to fulfil both of those roles. Neither the OS or game is fighting for that resource pool.
You don't determine how much ram you have, and then how to slice it. You pick your feature set and what's important to your audience, then you design your hardware and resource distribution around how that can be delivered.
As for the controversy thing, I think folks on ERA generally do pretty good job hosting these discussions without getting into console war territory. I think the moderators do a good job keeping folks in check also. I think this is one of the better places to have these discussions and I think at least there are a lot of people on here happy to talk about hardware and software, without those discussions existing for the sake of controversy.
