Microsoft gives developers extra RAM in Scorpio XDK

Microsoft’s Mike Ybarra has announced a further upgrade to Project Scorpio’s development kit, just days before the consumer version is due to unveiled.

Speaking on Twitter, the corporate VP of Xbox and Windows platforms said that an extra GB out the 12GBs GDDR5 RAM in the system was now available for developers to use. This will leave 3GB of memory for the opeartion of the Scorpio system.

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

Ybarra also added that available RAM that isn’t used by developers for their game will be used as a cache, therefore improving loading times and making the games ‘better’.

The details of the Xbox Development Kit (XDK) was recently discussed in a video created by Xbox. The design philosophy detailed from the Xbox Engineering Team’s Kevin Gammill was one of producing games at the highest possible level. Feedback from developers was that users wanted to develop games to a high standard and then back track to fine tune and optimise performance. Therefore, users needed a development kit that was more powerful than the consumer model.

Project Scoprio will be finally given a proper name at the Xbox press conference at E3 this Sunday, which starts at 2pm Pacific time (10pm UK time). Hopefully, details of its cost, its line up and what exactly it can do will be known. Until then however, Xbox will continue to tease about what’s to come, including a further tweet by Ybarra that shows he certainly isn’t taking any risks with his E3 luggage.

https://twitter.com/XboxQwik/status/872886596374208512