Rumor update: PS4 reserves up to 5GB of RAM for games [Update: ‘Absolutely false’, 6GB hinted]

Update: Brian Provinciano, head of confirmed PlayStation 4 developer Vblank Entertainment, has called the Digital Foundry rumors “absolutely false.”

“It’s absolutely false,” he said in response to the rumors. “Absolutely ridiculous.”

Provinciano went up with an editorial on the drama, in which he provides insight. He wouldn’t confirm how much memory is used, however.

Meanwhile, over on NeoGAF, known insider Thuway hinted PlayStation 4 will reserve six gigabytes of RAM for games and two for the operating system (Update within update: “There are games in development that are using 6 GB of RAM.”) BruceLeeRoy, another known insider, and forum admin Kagari corroborated Thuway’s report.

Obviously, nothing’s confirmed until Sony says something themselves. But considering they didn’t confirm numbers to Digital Foundry, I wouldn’t expect that at this point.

Original Story: Digital Foundry has followed up on its report yesterday claiming PlayStation 4 reserves 4.5 gigabytes of memory for games, with an additional gigabyte of ‘flexible’ memory, and 3.5 gigabytes for the operating system.

Today, new sources tell the site that, similar to yesterday, 4.5 gigabytes of PlayStation 4’s 8 gigabytes of GDDR5 memory is currently guaranteed to game developers, and an additional 512 megabytes of physical RAM from the flexible memory may be available in addition.

The report comes with comment from Sony, who didn’t confirm the amount of memory reserved or what it is used for, but offered to clear up misunderstandings regarding “direct” and “flexible” memory systems.

“‘Direct Memory’ is memory allocated under the traditional video game model, so the game controls all aspects of its allocation,” a Sony rep said.

“‘Flexible Memory’ is memory managed by the PS4 OS on the game’s behalf, and allows games to use some very nice FreeBSD virtual memory functionality. However this memory is 100 per cent the game’s memory, and is never used by the OS, and as it is the game’s memory it should be easy for every developer to use it.”

With Sony’s statement, Digital Foundry reckons there is 4.5 gigabytes of conventional RAM available to developers, alongside the OS-controlled flexible memory described by Sony.

“We understand that this is a 1GB virtual address space, split into two areas – 512MB of on-chip RAM is used (the physical area) and another 512MB is ‘paged,’ perhaps like a Windows swap file,” the site said. “But to be clear, of the 8GB of GDDR5 on PS4, our contention is that 5GB of it is available to developers.”