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.