Thanks to reader Michael C. for pointing out this rather depressing article. It talks about the PS3’s memory footprint. Memory is a big deal for developers, and the more you give them, the better the game. Even a little bit helps. Which is why I got slightly upset at this article.

I’d always heard that the PS3 OS’s memory footprint was about 64MB, down from an originally estimated 96MB. As it turns out, it’s not 64MB at all – it’s 84MB. That 84MB is 52MB of main memory and 32MB of video memory. Compare this to the Xbox 360’s 32MB total OS memory, and you see one of the reasons why people have more trouble developing PS3 games. 52MB makes a big difference.

But that’s not all!

Not only does the PS3’s OS take 84MB of memory, it can take more than that if you want to use special features. The worst offender is the buddy list, which takes an additional staggering 24MB of memory! Sony is doing something seriously wrong here. A buddy list system shouldn’t require near that amount of memory, by an order of magnitude.

Read the article for more – it’s all depressing.

PS3 Memory Footprint