There's no doubt in gamers' minds that Microsoft's Xbox One sequel, Project Scorpio, will be a beast in terms of performance and power, and new reports confirm that even further.
Microsoft has now freed up an extra gigabyte of Xbox Scorpio's system memory, giving developers a whopping total of 9 GB of RAM to play with, which will unarguably result in envelope-pushing game performance.
Microsoft Ups Xbox Scorpio RAM For Developers To Work With
"We'll keep tuning Scorpio to empower creators to share the best versions of their games," said Mike Ybarra, Microsoft's Xbox and Windows gaming corporate VP, on Twitter Thursday, June 8. "Unlocked extra GB of RAM for them, now 9GB of GDDR5."
The forthcoming Xbox Scorpio packs in 12 GB of system RAM in total, as Microsoft announced when it unveiled the console's specifications this past April. At the time, Microsoft confirmed that 4 GB would be reserved for system functions. By contrast, the Xbox One held back 3 GB out of its 8 GB system memory, but Scorpio needed another 1 GB of run its interface at a 4K resolution.
It appears Microsoft's clever engineers have found a recourse that'll enable the Xbox Scorpio to run its system processes with just 3 GB of RAM.
Keep in mind that the Xbox Scorpio also uses a better and much faster type of memory than its predecessor. Both the Xbox One and Xbox One S have 8 GB of DDR3 RAM, in addition to 32 MB of embedded static RAM, or ESRAM. With the Xbox Scorpio it's simply 12 GB of DDR5 RAM, 9 of which are freed up for developers to work with. The rest of the resources are reserved to handle system features, multitasking, and others.
Ybarra also explained that when games don't use the full 9 GB of RAM available, the remaining resources will be used as a cache, "making things load way faster, etc."
Xbox Scorpio Specs
Microsoft will share more details about the Xbox Scorpio at E3, although the console's specs are already available. The Scorpio engine packs 6 teraflops of power, a 326 GB/s memory bandwidth, and an advanced custom silicon. Microsoft claims the Scorpio is the most powerful console gaming processor ever created.
The console has a custom 2.3 GHz CPU, 1 TB of HDD storage, 12 GB of GDDR5 memory, of course, and supports 4K Blu-ray and DVD.
Earlier this May, Microsoft confirmed that Xbox Scorpio's development has been smoothly progressing, with the console still on track to launch this holiday season. This means that gamers won't have to go through frustrating delays, which, for such a powerful console, is surprising. Product delays often occur in the tech industry, so it's impressive that Microsoft will be able to live up to its originally promised release window.
Thoughts about the Xbox Scorpio? How do you think can game developers reach new performance heights with the console's allotted 9 GB of memory? Feel free to sound off in the comments section below!
