As rumored, Microsoft has released details of the final specifications for the Project Scorpio, the upcoming successor to the company’s current gaming console, the Xbox One. The details come through Digital Foundry, a gaming publication that was invited to speak with some of the engineers who worked on the new console and was given exclusive information about some of its characteristics. This method of revealing information is unusual in the video gaming industry, as companies tend to release details of this sort through flashy press events. As the journalist who was invited to speak with Microsoft, Richard Leadbetter, comments, “in all of my years in the business, I’ve never seen anything like it.” This approach to releasing information is similar to Apple’s recent reveal of
a refresh of the Mac Pro.
The core of the Xbox Project Scorpio will be powered by a SOC, or System on a Chip, which Microsoft is calling the “Scorpio Engine.” The Scorpio Engine contains the console’s processor, graphics card, and memory controllers, among other hardware elements in a very small chip, and includes seven billion transistors.
The Project Scorpio’s CPU will be an enhanced version of the controversial Jaguar CPU found in the original Xbox One, with a higher clock rate. Microsoft, however, has prioritized ensuring that the CPU and GPU components of the console can transfer data between one another efficiently, allowing for optimized performance of both components.
Additionally, Microsoft has integrated their DirectX 12 API directly into the console’s hardware, which optimizes performance for games built within the DirectX 12 infrastructure. The console will also have built-in hardware designed for audio processing, allowing a reduction in the workload of its CPU and enabling a more immersive and realistic sonic experience for gamers.
The console’s GPU is significantly improved over the Xbox One, and will be the fastest GPU on the gaming console market when the Scorpio launches in Q4 of this year. The graphics processor will run at six teraflops, which is a major improvement over the previous console’s 1.31 teraflop GPU. Microsoft achieved this impressive figure by exploiting an engineering trick: the console has only forty compute units, a relatively small number, but these compute units are clocked at 1172 MHz, which is a very high frequency. Approaching GPU engineering in this innovative way allows Microsoft to give the console an advantage over the competition in its console’s graphical fidelity.
Project Scorpio also includes improvements in the area of RAM, or random-access memory. It will utilize 12 GB of GDDR5 memory, which is the newest type of memory optimized for handling graphics-related data. The Scorpio’s memory bandwidth, which determines how much data can be moved to and from RAM at once, is also enhanced to 326 GB/s, much higher than the One’s 68 GB/s and the One S’s 219 GB/s. Although the console technically has 12 GB of RAM available, only 8 GB of this RAM is available to developers, as the other 4 GB are reserved for system functions.
One of the major focuses of the Project Scorpio is to enable high-fidelity gaming at native 4K resolution. The console’s enhanced specifications are intended to allow games to run at this level of fidelity without sacrificing performance or graphical detail.
Notably, the Scorpio is not marketed as an entirely new console to succeed the Xbox One, but rather as a mid-gen refresh. This means that, although developers may release titles that work exclusively on the Scorpio, the console will still be able to run games intended for the Xbox One. Developers may choose to update their existing games to take advantage of the new console’s improved capabilities, but the Scorpio is not a fundamentally different device than the Xbox One. Additionally, the engineers who designed the Scorpio used existing Xbox One titles as a point of reference to optimize their performance on the improved hardware, making it easier for developers to optimize their titles for the Scorpio.
Featured image via Wikimedia
