MCH2024
Member
Reports indicate that Mark Cerny gave PS6 30GB of unified memory; A ludicrous quantity of premium memory.
It's highly unlikely that he did it for the reasons that AMD misinformation peddlers spout (memory is cheap, 8GB GPUs should be free, you will need 16GB VRAM to play games, game developers actually need it, etc).
It's a calculated Attempt to shut 16GB PC GPUs out of the high-end gaming tier entirely. He compromised on raw GPU performance (~RTX 5070) and CPU (~AI 7 350 level) to afford it. That trade-off is the whole game.
Here's the question worth asking:
It's 30GB.
Before we begin, some facts about PC one needs to Accept before. If you disagree with these, fair enough, but don't derail the discussion based on them as these are auxiliary.
Now that we got this out of the way, let's divide PC into multiple tiers.
(RTX 60 Series is guesswork/illustrative)
You can immediately see that Cerny tried a version of this last generation.
PS5 launched with ~RTX 3060 raster performance and ~9GB of usable VRAM on the high end, and the vision was this:
PC gamers were having none of it. A lot of them owned 8GB GPUs that genuinely outperformed PS5 in raw rasterization to high hell, and they weren't going to accept being told their hardware was substandard and that they should just run low settings at 400FPS. Despite the AMD influencer ecosystem (MLID, Hardware Unboxed's Steve, etc) pushing hard for Cerny's framing, developers blinked after multiple disaster launches.
They burned an extra gigabyte of RAM on PS5 CPU / underutilized PS5's SSD. because PC was genuinely a bigger platform than high end console at that point. Even though PS5 ate up Xbox, high end console market shrank while PC grew.
The result: the number of games where 8GB is not enough for PS5+ settings (slightly less on textures, significantly better in VRAM light settings) can be counted on two hands. Cerny lost that round.
PS5 Pro was a concession in a way. Since PS5 couldn't really ray trace, so it was being cut out of that side of the generation.
30GB Is the Rematch
This time the gap is massive. That's the entire moat of PS6.
18GB VRAM+ should be mostly safe given the sheer market mass. It's doable engineering work for developers to work around using more CPU side memory and tweak compression to get 20-22GB into 18GB.
16GB is the battleground because Nvidia has so many GPUs there. It ranges from mass market cards (RTX 6060 TI 16GB) to cards that dumpster the PS6 in raw perf (RTX 5080).
Cerny can't afford for those GPUs to be able to match PS6. Because otherwise PC has had RTX 4080, a PS6 equivalent, since 2022.
Which is why he has to wait for lower memory prices to launch with 30GB. He can't launch with 20GB
Nvidia's counter will be straightforward again: flood the market with 16GB cards fast enough and cheap enough that developers can't afford to ignore them. If 16GB becomes the dominant install base at the high end, developers will cater to it the same way they catered to 8GB last gen.
It's highly unlikely that he did it for the reasons that AMD misinformation peddlers spout (memory is cheap, 8GB GPUs should be free, you will need 16GB VRAM to play games, game developers actually need it, etc).
It's a calculated Attempt to shut 16GB PC GPUs out of the high-end gaming tier entirely. He compromised on raw GPU performance (~RTX 5070) and CPU (~AI 7 350 level) to afford it. That trade-off is the whole game.
Here's the question worth asking:
It's 30GB.
Before we begin, some facts about PC one needs to Accept before. If you disagree with these, fair enough, but don't derail the discussion based on them as these are auxiliary.
With 93%+ market share, Nvidia is the only game in town. It doesn't matter if a niche budget brand (AMD Radeon or Intel Arc) offer a larger VRAM buffer at an affordable price, if nobody's buying them, they don't define the platform. PC Gaming is synonymous with GeForce.
AMD's Radeon has a long history of being delusional about where their GPUs actually land and how they perform relative to Nvidia. This is important because that's the frame of reference you need to adopt when translating the grand performance claims of console vs PC.
PS5 was not equivalent to a 3060 Ti whatsoever or even on the same planet as it. It was equivalent to a 6600 XT to a T.
PS5 was not equivalent to a 3060 Ti whatsoever or even on the same planet as it. It was equivalent to a 6600 XT to a T.
Now that we got this out of the way, let's divide PC into multiple tiers.
(RTX 60 Series is guesswork/illustrative)
You can immediately see that Cerny tried a version of this last generation.
PS5 launched with ~RTX 3060 raster performance and ~9GB of usable VRAM on the high end, and the vision was this:
PC gamers were having none of it. A lot of them owned 8GB GPUs that genuinely outperformed PS5 in raw rasterization to high hell, and they weren't going to accept being told their hardware was substandard and that they should just run low settings at 400FPS. Despite the AMD influencer ecosystem (MLID, Hardware Unboxed's Steve, etc) pushing hard for Cerny's framing, developers blinked after multiple disaster launches.
They burned an extra gigabyte of RAM on PS5 CPU / underutilized PS5's SSD. because PC was genuinely a bigger platform than high end console at that point. Even though PS5 ate up Xbox, high end console market shrank while PC grew.
The result: the number of games where 8GB is not enough for PS5+ settings (slightly less on textures, significantly better in VRAM light settings) can be counted on two hands. Cerny lost that round.
PS5 Pro was a concession in a way. Since PS5 couldn't really ray trace, so it was being cut out of that side of the generation.
30GB Is the Rematch
This time the gap is massive. That's the entire moat of PS6.
18GB VRAM+ should be mostly safe given the sheer market mass. It's doable engineering work for developers to work around using more CPU side memory and tweak compression to get 20-22GB into 18GB.
16GB is the battleground because Nvidia has so many GPUs there. It ranges from mass market cards (RTX 6060 TI 16GB) to cards that dumpster the PS6 in raw perf (RTX 5080).
Cerny can't afford for those GPUs to be able to match PS6. Because otherwise PC has had RTX 4080, a PS6 equivalent, since 2022.
Which is why he has to wait for lower memory prices to launch with 30GB. He can't launch with 20GB
Nvidia's counter will be straightforward again: flood the market with 16GB cards fast enough and cheap enough that developers can't afford to ignore them. If 16GB becomes the dominant install base at the high end, developers will cater to it the same way they catered to 8GB last gen.
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