Stardock’s CEO Brad Wardell had a lot of comments to make on Microsoft’s upcoming powerhouse of a console, the Xbox Scorpio.
In a departure from the norm, both Microsoft and Sony decided on a mid-season refresh of their game consoles, resulting in the recently released Sony PlayStation 4 Pro and the upcoming Microsoft Xbox Scorpio.
When it releases, the Xbox Scorpio will be the most powerful console on the market. Featuring an 8-core processor, 12 GB of GDDR5 memory and a 1 TB HDD, the console will put many an entry-level PC to shame and outclass the PS4 Pro by around 30 percent. It will also be the first, truly 4K-capable game console.
Realistically speaking, Stardock is only famous for one game, Ashes of the Singularity, a game that’s remained in the news for so long because it was one of the first DirectX 12 ready titles to ship and the fact that it is a favourite of PC component benchmarking enthusiasts.
In a series of tweets, Wardell essentially stated that the Xbox Scorpio is really powerful and that the 12 GB of RAM meant “no real technical limit on games” for some years. Of the 12 GB RAM, only 8 GB is accessible to developers, but this is still more than console game developers have had access to until now.
He goes on to add that developers would need a “core-neutral” game engine to take full advantage of the APIs (Application Program Interface) supported on the new consoles. Specifically, he’s referring to Microsoft’s DirectX 12 API and the Vulkan API. These APIs improve GPU performance significantly by reducing CPU overhead. As Wardell explains, properly supporting DirectX 12 and Vulkan can significantly reduce game loading times.
Of course, he did plug Stardock’s own game engine, which he said was a “core-neutral” one.
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