Crytek says 1GB extra RAM on PS4 Pro is 'substantial'

Sony added an additional 1GB of DDR3 RAM to the PS4 Pro, and now we have Crytek's Technical Director saying that it is "somewhat substantial", freeing up 1GB of the DDR5 RAM inside of the console.

Out of the 1GB of additional RAM, Sony is letting developers use 512MB of it for PS4 Pro games, while the other 512MB is used to render the interface at 4K. During an interview with Gaming Bolt, Crytek Technical Director Rok Erjavec said that the additional RAM in the PS4 Pro is benefitial for the gaming side, but also development.

He said: "The system gives us back an additional 0.5GB over thePS4, which is enough to fill in the increased requirements from things like 4K, higher quality rendering features, etc". Erjavec added: "Coming out at about a 10% increase, it can be seen as somewhat substantial relative to the base console, but mainly it's there to transparently allow for PS4 Pro-specific improvements without developers having to jump through complicated hoops".

Crytek has been making games for over 10 years, so their development history is strong (except for the company swinging from PC masters, to watered down console Crysis games), but I still respect the kick ass work they continue to pump out with CRYENGINE, and their push into VR.

Erjavec said that the PS4 Pro offers "interesting" enhancements, where he said: "There's a list of interesting enhancements that Pro brings to the table that we haven't had the opportunity to work with so closely in hardware before. Some things (like color compression) are transparent efficiency improvements, so really more of a balancing tool to allow high utilization of the increased compute resources despite the relatively smaller bandwidth increase. Others - like the ID buffer or hardware-multi res - actually pave the way for new rendering pipeline workflows, and as such still need to be experimented with to determine all the possibilities".