6 Things You Need To Know About Project Scorpio
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6 Things You Need To Know About Project Scorpio
Details and technical specifications of Microsoft’s Project Scorpio surfaced this past week and from what we can tell, it’s going to be the most powerful console to date. Eurogamer / Digital Foundry had the inside scoop and were also able to see the console in action. The report was dense with tech jargon and details, but to help digest this news, we have highlighted six important things you need to know about Project Scorpio.
It’s set to launch sometime in Q4 this year, around the Holiday season, and we don’t have a definitive price just yet. But for everything else related to the upcoming console, check out everything we’ve done here at GameSpot:
Scorpio’s Six Teraflops Confirmed
FLOPs--floating point operations per second--is simply a measurement of performance; it can be calculated by multiplying the number of compute units, raster operations (ROPs), and the core clock speed. Though it’s not a perfect indicator of how games will run due to potential bottlenecks, it gives us an idea of where performance will stand among other consoles and comparable PC components.
How do Scorpio’s six teraflops stack up against the competition? Well for starters, this measures at about four-and-a-half times higher than the Xbox One. Compared to Sony’s PlayStation 4 Pro, this is roughly a 30 percent increase. Scorpio will be the graphical powerhouse among consoles. The GPU itself is comprised of 40 custom compute units and is clocked at 1172 MHz.
CPU and System-On-Chip Design
Scorpio’s horsepower is built into what’s called a system-on-chip (SOC). Both the graphics and central processing units are housed on the SOC, which is where you’ll find its 8-core CPU. It’s described as an evolved version of the the Jaguar-based CPU inside the Xbox One, and it’s clocked at 2.3GHz for Scorpio; 550MHz faster than the Xbox One. Like the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 4 Pro, and Xbox One, Scorpio’s SOC is made by AMD.
The SOC is going to be cooled by a vapor chamber solution, similar to what Nvidia does for the GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards. There will also be a fan atop the SOC that’ll blow the hot air out the back of the console.
More Memory: 12 GB RAM GDDR5
Microsoft built 12GB of GDDR5 system memory into Scorpio. As it stands, 8GB will be dedicated to games, while 4GB will focus on background processes and overhead. This is a sizeable upgrade from Xbox One’s and 8GB overall with only 5GB dedicated to games. Not only is it 4GB less RAM, but it's slower DDR3 memory. Is this important? From what we can tell, yes. The system was shown using a little over 5GB in the Forza demo used to show off the Scorpio’s power.
The system will have a total memory bandwidth of 326GB/s, meaning it will offer much more memory throughput than any of the other consoles. For example, the PS4 Pro’s memory bandwidth is 218GB/s.
Forza Demo and Native 4K
Alongside the reveal of its tech specs, Scorpio was shown running the Forzatech engine, used in Forza Motorsport 6 and Forza Horizon 3 by Turn 10 Studios. The demo was said to be a straight port from the Xbox One version and ran at a native 4K resolution with high res art assets; it was pushing out 60 frames per second (FPS), with room to spare. According to that benchmark from Digital Foundry, the system peaked at about 70% GPU usage; texture filtering, lighting, and shadows remained untouched. Turn 10 also pushed the PC equivalent of ultra settings and the game still ran at 60 FPS with 88% GPU usage. There’s still untapped potential under the hood.
Keep in mind that this is one scenario, and Scorpio’s performance will vary from game to game. True 4K was promised and as far as we can tell, it’s being delivered, though not every game may hit 60 FPS.
Backwards Compatibility
If you have your eyes set on Project Scorpio, but are worried about certain games not running on it, don’t trip. Every Xbox One game will work just fine on Scorpio and every Xbox 360 backwards compatible game will as well. If games are to take full advantage of the improved hardware, the onus is on developers to implement the necessary tweaks.
More Powerful Than The PS4 Pro
Yes, Project Scorpio is more powerful than the PS4 Pro on paper, which was expected. However, both the PS4 Pro and Scorpio require developers to implement changes to take full advantage of the more powerful hardware. It’s hard to say how difficult this will be for developers, but according to Microsoft, Turn 10 was able to put together the Forza demo in two days.
However, Microsoft says that games that render at 1080p--and even 900p--on the Xbox One will get native 4K support with Scorpio. It remains to be seen what, if any, graphical compromises need to be made to maintain stable performance in future games.