Sony has officially confirmed that its upcoming PS Vita will boast a full 512MB of RAM – rather than the 256MB claimed by various rumors swirling around the Internet ether.
The 256MB figure first circulated in May, when a French source claimed Sony was halving the amount of memory in the Vita in an effort to lower the price point so the console could more effectively compete against Nintendo’s 3DS.
However, Shu Yoshida, Sony’s president of Worldwide Studios, insisted the Japanese-based corporation never considered cutting the amount of RAM for the Vita.
“It has been very funny. There were some rumors for the last few months. Some developer mentioned the RAM was halved. We never announced the amount of RAM, and we never changed it,” Yoshida told Eurogamer.
“We’ve been making games, right, and we’ve been showing the games, like Uncharted, since January. If RAM gets cut in the middle of development, there’s no way we can complete the games. So I was like, what’s going on? I got lots of Tweets saying, Sony made a huge mistake by reducing the amount of RAM. [But] we never talked about the amount of RAM and we never cut it.”
Yoshida also noted that the PS Vita boasted 128MB of V-RAM alongside the 512MB of main RAM – more than the PS3 – which clocks in at 256MB of XDR DRAM main memory and 256MB of GDDR3 video memory.
“Part of the reason [for including 512MB of RAM] is more RAM means easier development for game developers. But as important as that is to allow the PS Vita always to do more while the game is running in the background, or when you switch between the game and other applications or system software functionalities.
“So the reason why we were able to include something like Party, which enables cross-game voice chat, is because we designed Vita so it always has enough resources to handle something like that behind the game while it’s running,” he added.
