PS4 Pro Offers Additional 1GB RAM For 4K Gaming, User Interactions; Crytek Tagged RAM Increase As ‘Substantial’

As Sony's well-acclaimed console, PS4 Pro will come with a staggering 1TB hard drive and 4K HDR gaming experience. Now, according to Crytek's Technical Director, the additional RAM in the console is "somewhat substantial" on top of the 8GB GDDR5 RAM already onboard the system.

According to GamingBolt, The PS4 Pro is introduced as a "more powerful" console than the base PS4, which pushes Sony to include a 4K HDR capability on the said console through increased clock speeds, increased memory bandwidth, and even greater RAM.

The extra 1GB of DRAM, which is slower than the onboard GDDR5 already in the system, is suspected to run background applications when the user switches between apps and games in PS4 Pro.

WCCFTech reported that out of the 1GB of additional RAM, Sony is letting developers use 512MB of the additional memory for PS4 Pro games, while the other 512MB is used to render the interface at 4K.

In an exclusive interview with Gaming Bolt, Technical Director at Crytek Rok Erjavec implied that the additional RAM in the console is beneficial for its gaming side, while compensating for the higher demands that is running the 4K on the system.

"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," the Technical Director said.

He 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."

Erjavec also suggested that the PS4 Pro will sport interesting enhancements that may be considered transparent efficiency improvements. Some of the leaked features are an ID buffer and hardware-multi-res which reportedly paves the way for new rendering pipeline workflows. Overall, 4K gaming is still said to be in the experimental stage with more possibilities than ever.

In addition, owners can still improve their PS4 Pro processing capacity by swapping out the internal hard drive of the PS4. By manually swapping the existing HDD, users can 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 PS4 Pro is now available worldwide for $399.