Brad Wardell is the CEO of Stardock, the developers of many popular games including Ashes of the Singularity and Galactic Civilizations. Today, Wardell expressed his opinion on the Xbox Scorpio in a series of tweets on his official Twitter account.
Wardell says that with the 12GB GDDR5 RAM on the Xbox Scorpio, the developers will have “no real technical limits.
Re Scorpio: 12GB of GDDR5 memory means (for some years) no real technical limit on games.
— Brad Wardell (@draginol) April 23, 2017
The Xbox Scorpio has 12 Gigabytes of GDDR5 memory. However, not all that memory is available for games to use. Games can only use up to 8GB memory on the Scorpio. Wardell was asked if he considered the memory that games can use in his statement, he replied:
meh. How many video cards have 8gigs of Gddr5?
— Brad Wardell (@draginol) April 23, 2017
So yeah, according to Wardell, developers will have no technical boundaries on the Xbox Scorpio, thanks to the beefy memory.
In another tweet, Wardell stated that it’ll take developers around two years to fully utilize Xbox Scorpio’s power. According to Wardell, developers need a “core-neutral engine” to fully use the power of all-new graphical APIs like DirectX 12 and Vulcan. He also says that Stardock and Oxide’s graphics engine, called Nitrous engine, have a ” shipping core-neutral engine”. So far, the Nitrous engine is only used in Ashes of the Singularity.
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
In the end, Wardell said that new APIs like DirectX 12 and Vulcan can drastically improve loading times of video games. That’s because these new APIs have the ability to load textures and other graphical assets using multiple threads (all at the same time) to the GPU.
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
The Xbox Scorpio will arrive in Holiday 2017. It will have some beefy internals i.e. an octa-core AMD 2.3GHz processor, 40 compute units and 12 gigabytes of GDDR5 RAM. The Xbox Scorpio will probably cost over $500. For more, keep it locked on GeeksULTD.
