The Vice President of Xbox took to Twitter this morning and dropped some surprising news about the upcoming Xbox Scorpio. Microsoft is unlocking an extra gigabyte of RAM for developers to use in their games. This brings the total to 9GB – far more memory than any console has ever allowed for games. The Scorpio features 12GB of GDDR5 but Microsoft had reserved 4GB of it for their operating system and non-gaming apps.
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
The closest competitor for the Scorpio, Sony’s PlayStation 4 Pro, has 8GB of GDDR5 of which 5.5GB is available to developers to use in games.
Even if developers don’t use the extra gigabyte of memory in their games, it will still help performance. The console will treat unused RAM as a cache which means considerably faster load times.
