PS3 Reduces OS Footprint By More Than Half

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The PlayStation 3 has been long criticized for its bloated Operating System memory footprint. At its initial launch, over three years ago, Sony had reserved 120MBs, spread across the XDR and DDR Ram.

In comparison, Microsoft and their Xbox 360 have given game developers ample amounts of memory to work with. Slowly but surely, Sony has knocked down the size of the footprint, but recent internal documents indicate that Sony has made another sizeable cut.

Sony has reduced the size of the Operating System to a mere 50MBs. Broken down, 7MBs comes from local memory, while 43MBs comes from the main memory. Developers have long criticized Sony and the incredibly large memory footprint for some time now, and those have been warranted. Microsoft’s Xbox 360 has reserved, and stayed with only 32MBs of memory allocation. The more memory developers can play with is better.

The reason for the long delay in cutting the memory footprint is simple: Back when the PS3 was released, the software and applications Sony wanted to implement were still in the early conceptual stages. As a result, they portioned off a sizeable chunk of memory for the OS, not knowing how much they would need. Now that the PS3 is in its third year, Sony has a clear idea of what they want to do, so, consequently, they can lower the memory OS, as they don’t need it.

[Source]

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