The final specs for Microsoft’s Project Scorpio have been revealed, and based on these specs, Microsoft’s enhanced Xbox will deliver.
As covered earlier, Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry was given an exclusive look at Microsoft’s mid-gen console refresh, and the specs surely sound promising. During the Scorpio announcement last year, Microsoft promised 6 teraflops of computing power and Eurogamer has confirmed that Microsoft achieved this performance. Check out the Scorpio spec reveal down below:
The Scorpio will sport an eight-core custom Jaguar x86 (evolved) CPU clocked at 2.3GHz. This is roughly 30% faster than the CPU of the original Xbox, which is clocked at 1.75GHz. While this might seem a modest upgrade on the CPU side, the GPU truly is “a beast” according to Eurogamer. Being approximately 4.6 times stronger than the original XB1 GPU, the Scorpio’s GPU uses 40 customized compute units clocked at a whopping 1172MHz.
Microsoft’s enhanced Xbox console uses 12GB of GDDR5 RAM and a memory bandwidth of 326GB/s – that’s an amount of fast memory available. While the original Xbox One could only devote 5GB of the slower DDR3 memory, the Scorpio has 8GB of faster GDDR5 memory dedicated to its games.
In addition, Project Scorpio features an UHD Blu-ray drive and faster 1TB 2.5-inch HDD.
Based on the revealed specifications, the Scorpio not only has the potential to run Xbox One titles in native 4K resolution, it also has enough juice left to offer visual enhancements such as higher quality graphics and smoother framerates. The ForzaTech demo that was shown to Eurogamer ran at native 4K resolution at 60 frames per second, while only using 60-70% of the console’s resources. When graphics settings were increased to the equivalent of Forza Motorsport Apex’s Ultra settings, Scorpio still didn’t have a hard time rendering the racer. Take a look at the screenshot below.
"This is us. This is ForzaTech running 60 frames a second, 4K," Turn 10 Studio Software Architect, Chris Tecton, told Eurogamer. "We're still running with settings that we would have used in Forza 6... but this is also including 4K content... we've got authored assets for this set of the models, cars, tracks everything. We pushed it through and made sure the 4K textures were flowing through. We've got them all there at the right resolutions and they're not giving us enough of a bandwidth hit to offset that. If we drop back to when we originally ran and we didn't have 4K assets, it was maybe one per cent different. We were very much bound on a different point than memory bandwidth. It's been awesome and this is the point it's at."
It seems that Microsoft has really pushed console hardware to a higher new level with the Scorpio and we can’t wait for the console to release this holiday season.
