Amazing how many people are willing to bump their gums so early. Got a lot of abuse for even saying I was getting an Xbox One (as well as PS4) because it only had 5gb RAM compared to 8gb on PS4.
People still don't learn their lessons that developers often withhold information if it benefits them. This suddenly brings them much more in line with each other. What's interesting is Xbox One is supposedly pushing three OS's and does it with 3gb RAM and PS4 is pushing one OS with 3.5gb RAM. Wonder how these machines will use it.
If PS4 is able to bring up the system quicker from in-game after pressing the media button then I'll be happy. PS3 is improved but it's still ridiculously slow.
Either way, what is eluding many people is that 4gb+ of RAM in a console is absolutely massive and incomparable to how PC's use it.
Agreed, 4GB on a console is a huge amount of memory to be solely dedicated to a game by comparison to both PC and last gen consoles. As you say it's interesting to see some of the people that derided the Xbox for not having as much memory free as PS4 initially with comments about "bloat", now dismiss "only" having 4-5GB as unimportant now its looking like PS4 will also have the same available for games.
It actually makes sense for both consoles to leave some elbow room for upgrades and additional functionality given a 7-10 year expected lifespan. If you let devs use 7GB of the 8 available you can pretty much never get it back for the system OS in the future without breaking games. Much the same happened earlier this week when it became clear Xbox One will support indie developers in self publishing and that MS had never said it wouldn't, "nothing to announce now" was interpreted as "no support" by the drama lamaz.
Now Xbox One may even have better support for Indies with every Xbox one working as a dev kit (PS4 dev kits have been quoted by indie devs as costing ~$15k) the same people who proclaimed support for self publishing as a massive advantage for PS4 are now dismissing it as "affecting few people". Funny...
I do wonder as we get closer to release and more information surfaces if the choice will be quite a clear cut as people seemed to think initially. With it becoming clear over the last week that MS will support indie self publishing and sounding like there will be similar memory usage it'll be interesting to see how other things come together. PS4 still has an advantage in price and raw power which depending on APIs etc may or may not translate to being noticeable in game, whilst for me, Xbox has a much stronger initial game line up and nice touches like all dedicated multiplayer servers and fast app switching/snap. PS4 has some nice touches as well which will appeal to different people.
Who knows what else Sony/MS have in the wings though, it'll be interesting to see as we get closer to launch and more details work their way out though.
Either way I don't think anyone could make a bad choice. Both consoles will be stunningly good and I'm increasingly beginning to think the choice will come down to exclusives and which additional features you prefer.
