As we learned in the Digital Foundry reveal in April, the Scorpio has 12gb of GDDR5 RAM. At the time, it was said that 8gb would be available for games, and 4gb reserved for the OS and UI. Mike Ybarra, head of Xbox Live, confirmed today that Scorpio tuning is still on-going and that has now been bumped to 9gb for games. Even better, he confirmed that any RAM going unused for games by developers, will instead be used for the cache thereby improving performance of loading and the UI.
This is substantial when you consider the memory bandwidth of the system (326gb/s) and that the PS4 Pro, currently the most powerful console, only gives developers 5.5gb of RAM for games.
We’ll keep tuning Scorpio to empower creators to share the best versions of their games. Unlocked extra GB of RAM for them, now 9GB of GDDR5
— Mike Ybarra (@Qwik) June 8, 2017
Games that don’t use the full 9GB, the rest of the RAM will be used as a cache (making things load way faster, etc.). All games = better. https://t.co/yZTGOvBJRx
— Mike Ybarra (@Qwik) June 8, 2017
Our Take
The more we learn about Scorpio, the more impressed we become. Between the core power, unique design features, and the optimizations for developers, it really should present the most significant boost to console power we’ve seen in some time and put console gaming much more in-line with higher quality PC settings. Now it all comes down to the price……..
