Stardock's CEO Brad Wardell tweeted a lot today on gaming technology. According to him, Scorpio's 12GB of GGDR5 RAM means that at least for some years, there will be no real technical limit for games on the platform. That's even when considering the actual allocation available to developers (8GB, while PS4 Pro allows developers to occupy 5.5GB).
Re Scorpio: 12GB of GDDR5 memory means (for some years) no real technical limit on games.
— Brad Wardell (@draginol) April 23, 2017
meh. How many video cards have 8gigs of Gddr5?
— Brad Wardell (@draginol) April 23, 2017
Wardell also said that in order to properly exploit the power of new low-level APIs like DirectX 12 (also available on Scorpio) and Vulkan, game developers need a core-neutral engine and only Stardock/Oxide's Nitrous engine (so far used in the real strategy game Ashes of Singularity) can claim to fit the technical requirements while the other studios will need a couple years to get up to speed. Wardell then teased that a much bigger, AAA game will eventually be produced with the Nitrous engine.
And it'll take a couple years to make a AAA level core-neutral game to fully utilize the power like Scorpio and APIs like dx12/Vulkan.
— Brad Wardell (@draginol) April 23, 2017
With @ashesgame it was our first real test of Nitrous (our multicore engine). We love it but it's not AAA.
— Brad Wardell (@draginol) April 23, 2017
Finally, Stardock's CEO suggested that DirectX 12 and Vulkan could even speed up loading times since these two APIs are technically able to load graphics assets to the GPU from multiple threads in parallel.
It will be interesting to see when and if developers start using this feature.
One big feature of @DirectX12 and @VulkanAPI that ppl don't hear much is that I can load gfx assets to the GPU from multiple threads.
— Brad Wardell (@draginol) April 23, 2017
Most of your loading screen time today is caused from processing textures and meshes. In dx12/Vulcan, this can easily be done in parallel.
— Brad Wardell (@draginol) April 23, 2017
Microsoft's Scorpio will have 6 teraflops of computing power, an eight-core CPU clocked at 2.3Ghz, 12GB of GDDR5 RAM and 40 Compute Units with the clear goal to deliver true 4K gaming to console gamers.
It will be available sometime in Holiday 2017, with an expected price point of $499 or more. We'll have a lot more on the new Xbox console and its line-up from E3 2017, so stay tuned.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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