PC RAM vs COnsole Ram

[GhandiInstinct]

What's the difference? Is 256mb of console ram equivelant to PC 256?

 

[PerfeK]

256mb DDR is the same on both but consoles don't need as much RAM as PCs.

They use tiny operating systems and only use the RAM for the actual games. PCs can use up to 300mb on useless system cache.

The xbox1 uses a 1mb stripped Windows 2000 kernel.

 

[GhandiInstinct]

Quite the leap of faith for Xbox2 then going from 64 to 512 = )

 

[phisrow]

One thing to note is that most consoles are architecturally very dissimilar from PCs. The Xbox was a fairly normal PC, all told; but most of the others are something else entirely. A lot of them, for example, will do something like have a fairly small amount of high speed ram shared between the CPU and the GPU. At least these days, the actual RAM chips are pretty much the same everywhere, because it is a lot cheaper to use one of the well defined commodity RAM types (DDR, DDR2, GDDR3, etc.) than it is to define some sort of wacky custom RAM; but console architectures are pretty unusual by PC standards.

 

[hippotautamus]

It's more that they don't require a large memory bank. The Xbox 2's main strength lies in the nextgen video card and CPU - lots of cache and texture memory = less need for system RAM.