Is Sony’s PS4 Pro Increased RAM Enough for 4K?; Hard Drive Replaceable

Sony added an extra 1GB of DDR3 DRAM to its PS4 Pro on top of the 8GB GDDR5 RAM already onboard the system.

The extra 1GB of DRAM, which is slower than the onboard GDDR5 already in the system, will reportedly be utilized for background applications when the user switches between apps and games in the PS4 Pro. The added RAM reportedly lessens the burden on the standard RAM that allows the user to play their games more smoothly. Sony has been pushing PS4 Pro as a 4K gaming console. More so, the unit is found to have increased clock speeds, memory bandwidth, and now the addition of more RAM.

Ron Erjavek, Technical Director at Crytek believes the additional 1GB of RAM for the PS4 Pro is enough to compensate for the higher demand for the system to push 4K, according to GamingBolt. He cites the added 10 percent increase is somewhat substantial compared to the standard PS4 console.

Why add 1GB DDR3?

System Architect for the PS4 Pro, Mark Cerny, confirms the additional 1 GB DRAM is utilized to swap out non-game apps like Netflix in memory that will allow faster switching between a game and something else. He says that partly using the onboard graphics RAM for multitasking purposes is not the optimal, which as he says, is the reason why Sony decided to install the added RAM, according to Polygon.

Cerny also cites an example that when a user stops viewing Netflix, the app is moved to the slower DRAM. The strategy he says frees up almost a gigabyte of the 8GB of GDDR5. Half of these freed up RAM is, therefore, available to game developers. The extra graphics memory is utilized to draw the console's interface at 4K.

Replaceable Hard Drive

Same as the PS4 and PS3, owners will be able to swap out the internal hard drive of the PS4. The PS4 Pro uses a SATA III interface that is equipped to support Solid-State Drives (SSD). According to GameSpot, manually swapping the existing HDD allows users to scale up the speed of the drive up to 6 Gb/s, which is double the original PS4's SATA II interface pegged at 3 Gb/s.

The Sony PS4 Pro is now available and retails for $400.00