The original X-Box only had 64 MB of RAM. If you look at games like Splinter Cell, Project Gotham Racing, ESPN NFL 2k5 or MLB 2k5, I'd say 256 MB would go pretty goddamn far.
Definitely. You just need to look at current Xbox games to see how far console developers can push RAM. Even better, look at GameCube games like Resident Evil 4. Those are working with only 40 MB, 16 of which is slow-ass ARAM that has to be copied back and forth to real RAM to be usable.
Another thing devs need to watch out for on next-gen consoles is the amount of time it will take to fill all that memory. Disc read speed has increased by a small amount, but RAM has increased by a factor of 4. We're going to see some painfully long load times in level-based games.
And don't be surprised if Microsoft ships with 512 MB instead of 256.
Console ram is very different from PC ram as far as usage, because most consoles have hardware that do a lot more work.
For example a 2d console game in the 16-bit era could use sprites, per-sprite color palettes indexed with 4 bits, reflection, scaling, etc. So the PC version ends up taking up 8x the disk space and ram for the exact same game.
vampirehipi23: I would enjoy a book written by a monkey and turned into a movie rather than this.
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