GenAI users Larian forced to build Divinity around RAM shortage caused by GenAI

Low memory supplies are dictating optimisations "we didn't necessarily want to do"

The ongoing RAM shortage (and subsequent and pricing explosion) is imposing a wider range of grim effects than even the Great GPU Famine of 2020. First came the death of one of gaming hardware’s most reliable memory and SSD makers, and now... uh... Larian’s new Divinity game is going to be more optimised for PC than it otherwise would have been?

That’s what Larian CEO Swen Vincke (clearly on a media tour – here’s him discussing Divinity with our Edwin) told TheGamer, anyway. Vincke notes that because the lack of affordable RAM options is making it harder to predict the horsepower of future PCs, "we already need to do a lot of optimization work in early access that we didn't necessarily want to do at that point in time." That doesn’t sound especially horrible to me – higher performance on lower-end rigs ultimately means more players can join in – though nowhere in the full interview does Vincke acknowledge that the shortage is being directly caused and sustained by demand from data centres that power generative AI, a technology that Larian are using in Divinity’s production, and that Vincke himself is defending the use of.

This doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be chugging potions out of six-fingered hands, or leading your party into the homely village of Ecwwhehw. Larian’s boss man is adamant that "We are neither releasing a game with any AI components, nor are we looking at trimming down teams to replace them with AI," with the company supposedly limiting their genAI application to things like placeholder text and references for concept artists.

Without wanting to prosecute yet another argument about it – not this late in the afternoon, at least – I still don’t think that approach addresses the problems with environmental damage, unauthorised scraping, or even really labour replacement that genAI continues to swirl around in. It’s also a fact that any usage of tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, or Adobe Firefly, however limited, adds demand to those data centres that are hogging all our RAM sticks.

This effects of this artificial memory shortage, again, extend far beyond how well Divinity will run on 16GB of DDR4. Soaring prices are expected to last well into 2026, with production costs for laptops, pre-built PCs and possibly games consoles passed onto consumers, while Valve are rumoured to be reconsidering both their pricing and launch date plans for the new Steam Machine. Even hardware heavyweights Nvidia are reportedly cutting GPU production plans, due to a lack of available GDDR7 memory, and their own supplying of graphics chips to the genAI industry has made them the richest company on Earth.