Compare the graphics, mechanics and size of games...

what i mean is why since ps4 it is no longer 12x-113x more ram, but only ~2x more between generations
this way it is gonna take 3 decades for a 16x increase. (what used to be one generation jump)
it took 3 decades to move from atari 2600 to ps4

A *mere* moore's law doubling! /s

More likely, one needs to consider the 'game industry collapse' into the timeline.

Computer technologies continued to develop and grow, but game consoles were a toxic investment for awhile due to a certain infamous videogame that got buried in the desert to dispose of the cartridges...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial

It took awhile for the industry to reinvigorate, and it makes sense for early entries to use spartan specs as cost saving measures in that period, followed by commercial successes, and the loss of the stigma. After that, investment capital would have been more available, allowing beefier and costlier hardware, then hitting moore's law again.

Nintendo had a hard sell, in terms of convincing US retailers and investors, that its console and games would not suffer the same fate. This is incidentally why the 10NES chip lockout, and the 'nintendo seal of approval' were things.

https://www.nomadsreviews.co.uk/post/the-hist … ming-on-the-nes

The NES was a commercial success, which spurred the SNES/GENESIS competition era, during which time, tech continued to evolve, and investors slowly got less cagey.

The headwind in computing tech got subsumed eventually, and so did the degree of spec jump.

even a mere 12x more would mean ps5 should have 100gb ram and ps6 should have 1,2tb ram. computer hardware is not there yet. it has nothing to do with games collapsing in 1982. the story begun in 1977 and was fast growing till 2013.
2013 was a stop.

It beginning *before* the collapse is *not* proof that the collapse is unimplicated. In order to *collapase*, it has to exist first!

During the interim between 1982 and 1990, computing tech really took off in quite a few areas, with economies of scale continuing to expand. This meant that the derivative of the 6502 found in the NES was much cheaper than its forebear in the 80s, before the hit, and had become a commodity chip.

Similar story with the zilog found in Genesis, etc.

That headwind in the PC parts industry got leapfrogged over a few decades, and now there is more or less spec parity.

you are baisically saying it should be like this:

ps3 - 4GB ram
ps2 - 2GB ram
PS1 - 1GB ram
snes- 512MB ram
nes - 256MB ram
atari2600-128MB ram

find me a pc in 1977 with 128MB ram 😀

No.

I am saying THIS:

In 1977, all computing components were limited quantities of new and novel silicon. Things were getting made on 'huge' die processes (over 90 nm), with hand-drawn photo resists. Things being very expensive cramps what goes into a commercial game console.

Atari leverages this *anyway*, going from things that can barely draw white bars on the screen, toa gaming icon, in just a few years.

This is because computing tech was growing very fast, and the baseline memory and processor tech in computers was growing like a rocket going into orbit.

For reference, the TI99 4/A shipped with 16kb of memory in 1981. That's 8x what was in the NES, 2 yr later.

At the same time, the C64 shipped with 64k of ram in 1982, which was 4x what was in the TI's base model, and 32x what was in the NES.

The NES was a risky investment, and as demonstrated, the 2k of ram is piddly compared to where the PC market was.

The NES enjoyed market dominance for 7 YEARS.

During which time, PC parts parity went to systems with multiple megabytes of RAM.

The SNES's move up the scale is very modest, in comparison.

This trend continued for quite a while, until parts commodities scales allowed closer and closer parts parity, until hitting it.

1) The NES has 2KB of SRAM. The SNES has 128KB of DRAM which is cheaper than SRAM (but slower and requiring more support circuitry). The NES can access its entire memory in 1.1ms. The SNES can access its entire memory in 49ms. A modern console with 128GB of 256-bit DDR5-6400 would take 671ms. Speed has fallen behind compared to size.

2) The inflation adjusted price of an NES is higher than a base PS5, using official figures. (And official inflation numbers are notoriously understated.)

3) Huge RAM implies huge games, and these have a bigger distribution cost whether it's physical media or downloads.

I have added nvidia cards with most ram from same year as PS consoles
and they are all in the same size range.
So it looks PCs were constantly same ram sizes range as PS consoles.

Fairchild Channel F (1976) - 2 kB -- Apple I (1976) 8kB
Atari 5200 (1982) - 16 kB -- IBM CGA (1981) 16kB
SNES (1990) - 256 kB -- Ati Mach 8 (1991) 1024kB
PS1 (1994) - 3MB -- nvidia nv1 (1995) 4MB
PS2 (2000) - 36MB -- GeForce2 Ultra 64MB
PS3 (2006) - 512MB -- GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB
PS4 (2013) - 8GB -- GeForce GTX TITAN 6GB
PS5 (2020) - 18GB -- GeForce RTX 3090 24GB
PS6 (202?) - 32GB -- GeForce RTX 5090-32GB

i have updated the first post with more advanced consoles.
growth is more stable now

robertmo3 wrote on 2026-02-11, 14:58:

what i mean is why since ps4 it is no longer 12x-113x more ram, but only ~2x more between generations
this way it is gonna take 3 decades for a 16x increase. (what used to be one generation jump)
it took 3 decades to move from atari 2600 to ps4

Which game requires 96+ gigabytes of ram?

of course game developers try to design games for hardware that is already in hands of players including many years old hardware so most amount of people can pay 😀
and i guess it is not a problem to make game for whatever amount of ram you imagine 😉
of course small ssds and slow cpus/gpus may be a problem too

updated console - gpu pairs so now all consoles have a pair