Another example of someone reading something on the internet, having no idea what it means but coming up with their own conclusions anyway. I don't see how you can twist the fact that 3GB of ram is dedicated to the OS to a nice chunk of power of the system is for the OS. Ram isn't power and 5GB is still overkill for a dedicated gaming system. There hasn't been a game released yet that has required anywhere close to 5GB of ram. Look at the features that Sony is offering. They're going to have to dedicate of chunk of their ram to their OS as well. They've made a gaming console that they hope will be the only device necessary in the living room which is exactly the same thing that Sony has made.

I agree with this.

You PC also has a couple of gigs of RAM on the graphics card that Task Manager doesn't account for.

Oh, I read about this on Neogaf.

I'm not sure I can entirely believe this stuff especially if good looking games are coming out from all of the major publishers.

Even if the rumor is true and they downclock their GPU games will still look great. Not 2000$+ PC great, but I don't think it will be noticable that much. However the hardware geek inside me cries: Please don't ruin your console by rushing it to market. Take a deep breath, sort things out and come back all guns blazing when the effing thing is ready. That would be my approach.

What? That has nothing to do with what I said, I was talking about the system ram usage, not the VRAM.

I wasn't debating how much VRAM it uses, only system RAM. I thought that was pretty obvious as system and VRAM are always treated as separate. PCs don't use combined memory after all, well, unless you're using a laptop with integrated graphics.

It counts towards the total memory usage. Saying a game needs only two gigs of memory is misleading if it needs another two gigs that just happen to be on the graphics card. Especially if you're comparing to a machine with an unified memory architecture.

But what if the card doesn't have much VRAM? I always thought that say if you had no VRAM and like 16 GB of System RAM, the game will still run like shit because you need VRAM separate. Or does the card somehow convert system RAM into VRAM?

The answer is "It depends". On the PC side this style architecture isn't new it has never been widely adopted outside of laptops. On desktops, you have enough room and power that it pays to have separate high powered RAM and processors. In a laptop it doesn't make sense where the concern is more about heat and power.

Basically on a desktop PC it makes a lot of sense to buy a 2GB video card and 16GB mobo that communicate through a specialized high speed memory bus. In a compact or embedded system, that would be a luxury.

Really excellent and interesting post, thanks eloj.