Rumor has it that the PS4 OS (operating system) uses up a total of 3.5 GB memory. But that’s not a bad thing since the the PS4 has a total of 8 GB of physical memory which leaves 4.5 GB of memory to use for whatever developers want to use it for. That’s still enough to for amazing worlds to explore and intelligent AI for us to play with. What does that mean? Simply put, it means that in order to keep things running smoothing.

According to an “anonymous sources clarified to Digital Foundry that 1GB of the reserved RAM is available as “flexible memory” and “may be reclaimed from the OS reservation, based on availability,” making 5.5GB potentially accessible.” 

This part may seem a little confusing but we’ll try to make sense of this the best we can. Now even though the PS4 uses 3.5 GB of memory for its operating system, the PS4 OS isn’t dependent on that extra gigabyte of ram to fully function and could presumably work with on 2.5 GB of ram. 

The “flexible memory” simple be used could to “boost elements of the games” as long as the memory isn’t being used by the PlayStation OS. Apparently the PS4 dev kits have a mode called “Game Memory Budget Mode.” Currently these two modes offer a “normal” and a “large” options. The “normal” allowing for 4.5GB of memory to be used by games, while “large” can be use 5.25GB.

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