Microsoft's next games console is Project Scorpio, which is set to be on display at E3 next week. In the run up to that reveal, Microsoft decided to share some details about the new hardware including its spec which appeared back in April. Now the spec has been updated, and it's sure to please game developers.
Scorpio ships with 12GB of GDDR5 memory. However, Microsoft initially had to reserve 4GB of that memory in order to allow the underlying Scorpio system to function and the interface to be displayed in 4K resolution. But the Scorpio development team continues to optimize the platform, and they've managed to cut the memory required for the system down to just 3GB.
Mike Ybarra, corporate vice president of Xbox & Windows gaming platforms at Microsoft, confirmed the optimization through his Twitter account:
This is great news for Scorpio games. It means instead of having 8GB of memory to play with, they now have 9GB. It may not sound like much extra on paper, but you can store a lot of data in 1GB.
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For comparison, the PS4 Pro (and PS4) ship with just 8GB of GDDR5 memory. Sony also reserves 3GB of that for the system, but also added 1GB of DDR3 memory to the Pro. That way an extra gigabyte of the faster GDDR5 memory is unlocked for games, meaning 6GB for games compared to Scorpio's 9GB.
As to what happens if a game is only going to use the original 8GB... Ybarra offers an answer for that too via Twitter. The extra gigabyte will be put to good use acting as a block of cache memory, which translates into faster loading times. So it's a win-win having the extra memory available regardless of how it is used.
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