Power is always a central pillar of the console wars and Microsoft just announced that even more will be available to game developers with the Xbox Scorpio. The console maker has freed up even more memory for gaming on top of the already substantial memory upgrade.
Ahead of Sunday's E3 2017 media briefing, Xbox vice president Mike Ybarra announced via Twitter that an extra 1GB of memory has been freed up for games to use on Scorpio.
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 (@XboxQwik) June 8, 2017
How Xbox Scorpio uses memory now
Microsoft listened to developers when designing the Xbox Scorpio and upgraded the memory from 8GB of DDR3 in the Xbox One to 12GB of DDR5 for the new console.
Only 6GB are available for gaming with the current hardware while 8GB was previously announced for Scorpio. Additionally, the memory bandwidth in the newer console is significantly faster. The remaining memory is meant to be used by the console operating system to manage the system, run non-gaming applications like Netflix, and help with load times.
The change announced today gives Xbox Scorpio 9GB dedicated to gaming and 3GB for non-gaming use. For comparison, the PlayStation 4 Pro uses 8GB of DDR5 RAM with 5.5GB dedicated to running games. The rest is used to manage the system, including an extra 1GB of slower DDR3 to help out.
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 (@XboxQwik) June 8, 2017
Why more memory is important for Xbox Scorpio
To put it simply, more is always better when it comes to gaming hardware.
More memory can greatly help the storing and processing of game worlds, objects, NPC, and AI even if the CPU is not as powerful as it could be.
An example of this happened to me recently as my modest gaming PC sports an older processor (i5-3570k) paired with a Nvidia GTX 1070 video card. I started noticing stuttering in games, particularly ones with large open-world areas and plenty of objects to keep in memory.
I bumped the system memory from 8GB to 16GB and the stuttering went away.
An extra 3GB of memory in the Xbox Scorpio is not as dramatic as 8GB, but the memory available is also magnified on dedicated gaming consoles that don't have other processes running in the background like a PC.
The additional memory also helps with any CPU limitations the console may experience.
Microsoft has engineered several new customizations into the Scorpio's new processor and bumped the speed up slightly. However, it is still based on the same CPU in the Xbox One and games are forever getting bigger and more complex.
Attempting to run games at 4K resolution and 60 frames per second (fps) will strain not just the GPU in a console, but the CPU as well. Bungie recently pointed out CPU constraints on the PS4 Pro as the reason why "Destiny 2" will run at 4K and 30 fps on the system. How well the extra memory is put to use will ultimately be up to developers.
