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Microsoft has revealed that it has freed up more memory for Project Scorpio game developers. The machine ships with 12GB of GDDR5 memory - and now 9GB of the total is available for titles, with the remaining 3GB used for system-level operations and other applications, including a native 4K dashboard. The news comes via a tweet from Mike Ybarra, corporate vice president of the Xbox and Windows gaming platform.During our trip to Microsoft's Redmond campus a few months back, the Xbox hardware team told us that the split was 8GB for titles and 4GB for the system. This still represents a large increase over the memory available on the standard Xbox One, where 5GB of memory is free for developer use. For Scorpio though, 9GB is now on tap for game-makers, the extra memory used for the larger render targets required for a 4K framebuffer, as well as higher resolution art.
More memory for games is obviously a good thing, and Microsoft's work in this area now sees Scorpio's system reservation achieve parity with Xbox One's - no mean feat bearing in mind that move to a native 4K dash. Based on a further Ybarra tweet, it seems that titles that don't use the extra memory can utilise whatever's left as a caching system, to help speed up loading times. Ybarra says this can applies to all software, whereas previously, we understood that only Xbox One titles running on Scorpio would get the upgrade. We've asked Microsoft for clarification. [UPDATE: Microsoft has confirmed that Ybarra is talking about the existing Xbox games library here.]
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