It blew my mind to hear that the Xbox ran on 64mb of RAM.
https://quade.co/2018/xbox-128mb-ram-upgrade/
Regular Xbox games don't benefit of course, but it becomes possible to play arcade games based on the Sega Chihiro platform (an Xbox derivative with 128mb RAM)
64MB was small compared to contemporary PCs, but it was a powerhouse among the major console competitors.
Xbox - 64mb
Xbox 360 - 512mb
Xbox One - 8 GB (later 12 GB)
Xbox Series X - 16 GB
This last one also surprises me, was expecting at least 32GB
> This last one also surprises me, was expecting at least 32GB
Well the GPU is comparable to 8GB models, so I can see why 16GB would work fine. You don't need that much space for game state.
Though looking into the Series X more, they sure set up the ram weirdly. There are 4 1GB memory chips and 6 2GB chips. This gives it 10GB of very fast memory, and 6GB of somewhat fast memory. The operating system reserves 2.5GB of the somewhat fast memory, and games get 13.5GB
The 'natural' setup would be 20GB, and they didn't even go that high, so they must be plenty confident that 32GB is well beyond what they need.
It depends on what you're comparing to. It costs more than having 8x2GB, but costs less than 10x2GB.
> I believe NVIDIA released at least one card where part of its VRAM had certain limitations.
Well there was the fiasco that was the GTX 970, because one chunk of memory was one seventh as fast as the rest. Plus a couple other quirky models. This move should be much easier to deal with, and making developers deal with it is the kind of thing a console can do much more easily than PC hardware.
Like, it's 16gb, but it's 16gb that only has to cover the next few seconds of gameplay, not the next 30 seconds.