The OS needs to handle downloading updates in the background while streaming or recording the game, running Spotify and Xbox live party voice chat, and the dashboard. It could probably make do with less but you can't change (e: increase) the memory allocation later.

Windows 10 x64 minimum RAM specs is 2GB. Another half GB for whatever stuff you're running makes sense.

A good deal is probably for future proofing and for auxillary applications that run parrallel to games like voice and social stuff.

> Can someone explain why an OS needs that much?

Because modern software development is a joke.

Misplaced aggression. Consoles are still one of the most heavily optimized platform. The OS is doing a lot more these days those - voice chat, playing music, background downloads, etc etc

That honestly doesn't need 2.5GB. On my Linux machine I can run a web browser, KDE, Telegram and Pacman on barely over 800MB.

But can you do voice chat, play music, background downloads, live streaming and game streaming (to another device), etc.? Because a console has to do it all real-time, without crapping out, and without any future possibility of upgrading the RAM.

Your comparison is like saying you can do a 305Km F1 race in a Fiesta with less fuel than an F1 car. I ran everything you listed (short of Telegram but how much can that need?) on 64MB of RAM 20 years ago. And to be fair, I can do it now in well under 500MB. But it won't run Xbox loads properly.

Yes, yes I can. Pacman does background downloads, Spotify does music streaming, Telegram does voice chat. Firefox does the rest. Mind you, that's the amount of memory when I'm doing it all at once. You won't be listening to music, using the browser, downloading updates and streaming at the same time.

Game streaming and live streaming are done in hardware by the GPU through accelerated encode. System memory is only really used for sending it to the network.

Yeah. Everything was so much better back in the 90s........