Sony and Microsoft sure did a good job designing their current-gen consoles to ensure that they have enough horse power to run highly-demanding modern games; however, Crytek US Engine Business Development Manager Sean Tracy believes that both consoles still don't have enough memory for modern AAA titles.
"I would have to agree with the viewpoint that 8 gigs can easily be filled up, but also keep in mind that developers don’t necessarily even have access to all 8 gigs of it," he argued. For example the Xbox One retains some of the RAM for OS purposes. Since technology, as Ray Kurweil states, progresses exponentially, we will soon find that the computational requirements of games will quickly hit the ceiling of a few gigs of ram. We already had to manage quite intensely our memory usage throughout Ryse and this will be one of the limiting factors surely in this generation.
"As hardware gets stronger the complexity of scenes can be increased and the dynamism within them," he added. However, with that said it’s not the raw power alone that will allow for photo-realistic graphics but technology that intelligently scales and utilizes all that the hardware has to offer."
Xbox One hosts 8GB or DDR3 RAM, but it reserves 3GB of them for Operating System and background applications. On the other hand, PlayStation 4 allows games to use an entire 8GB of high speed GDDR5 RAM while reserving 256MB of DDR3 for Operating System and background applications. Now that Kinect has become optional, it is possible for Microsoft to optimize Xbox One OS and reduce its memory footprint, but it will always lag behind PS4 in terms of memory speed and size available for games.