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What's powering Project Scorpio?

Although we haven't seen the console running for ourselves, Microsoft has released the full specs in an interview with Eurogamer's Digital Foundry.

The headline feature of the new console is its GPU, which will pack a massive six teraflops of graphical performance. Scorpio's GPU has 40 compute units (compared to the original Xbox's 12) running at a clockspeed of 1172MHz (up from 853MHz), which is a big jump over both the original Xbox and the PS4 Pro.

In particular its GPU is 4.6 times more powerful than the original Xbox One.

Before you start celebrating, that's still a fair amount less than Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card, which pumps out a whopping nine teraflops but, considering that high-quality VR only requires a GTX 970 to work properly, Project Scorpio shouldn't (in theory at least) have any trouble providing Xbox gamers with their first foray into virtual reality.

However, the console should be able to run very efficiently thanks to upgrades to its command processor, which has been upgraded to make use of Microsoft's new DirectX 12 graphics API, resulting in efficiency savings for the console of as much as 50% for titles running on the new API, according to Microsoft.
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All of this means that rendering in native 4K is a real possibility for the new console, which contradicts a Microsoft whitepaper published last year which suggested that the new console would make use of upscaling techniques called 'half-resolution' and 'sparse rendering'.

Half-resolution is a technique whereby graphically intensive effects are run at a lower resolution than the game as a whole, and are then upscaled to the full resolution.

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Meanwhile, sparse rendering is a technique that's similar to the PS4 Pro's 'checkerboarding' technique, which cleverly upscales games to 4K in a way that's almost indistinguishable from the native resolution.

While Microsoft has said that it's targeting native 4K for its first-party titles, these techniques suggest that the Project Scorpio's games will run at different resolutions, depending on their developer's priorities.

The other advantage Scorpio has is that, since the Xbox One runs Windows, it'll be easy for game developers to create games to work on both platforms.

"The capability to build a game that actually takes advantage of different hardware capabilities is part of any third-party dev ecosystem, or anybody who's targeting Windows and console at the same time," said Xbox head Phil Spencer speaking to Wired.

Microsoft also promises the console will be able to render visuals at 60Hz, which means silky smooth gameplay that's synced to your TV's refresh rate. Digital Foundry's video in particular showed off a port of Forza Motorsport running at 60Hz at 4K.
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Whose VR headset?
Xbox has recently announced that it will be bringing mixed reality headset support to Xbox One and Scorpio in 2018.
Xbox owners won't be limited to just one headset. Instead the console will support all Windows Mixed Reality headsets, which include models from Lenovo, Dell, Acer and HP.
Virtual reality is likely to also be one of the big selling points of Project Scorpio, but Microsoft doesn't have its own VR headset and won't be developing its own for now.
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Yes, it has HoloLens, but that's for augmented reality and not VR. Instead, Microsoft will use an existing VR headset like the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive, though Spencer doesn't name any specific headsets as being partners.

The logical choice here might be Oculus Rift, as Microsoft partnered with the Facebook-backed company earlier in the year to launch every headset with an Xbox One controller. Plus, a more unified platform between PCs and Xbox could make it easy on developers to port existing Rift games to Xbox One without any extra work.
Here's the bad news: since Project Scorpio doesn't come bundled with a VR headset at least not one that Spencer mentioned expect to spend an additional $600-$800 (£499-£689) for one.
An improved gaming experience
One interesting revelation from Microsoft's E3 announcement is that all consoles in the Xbox One family, including Scorpio and the One S, will be able to play from the same library of games. Scorpio will also apparently support a select number of Xbox 360 games just like the Xbox One. However, more powerful consoles like Scorpio will feature better gaming experiences due to the more powerful components.

One example given by Digital Foundry was Forza Motorsport 6. They showed a screenshot of the game running in 4K while still maintaining 60fps, while still having plenty of GPU horsepower to spare.

Most interesting was the fact that this game had been ported to Scorpio after just a couple of days of porting work. This ease suggests that we might see a lot of games being ported to the new

This suggests that 1080p Xbox One games should be able to run at 4K on Xbox One without too much trouble, and Microsoft has also said that it intends for games with a resolution of 900p on Xbox One to also run at 4K on Xbox One.

However, even if you're stick rocking a Full HD TV you should benefit from the Scorpio's ability to super-sample games from 4K down to 1080p, which should result in a boost to detail.
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How much will it cost?

Microsoft obviously hasn't nailed down a price range for the upcoming console yet, though Spencer has dropped hints about it when speaking with The Verge.

He said, "We're not ready to announce something right now, but you can imagine at the price point of Scorpio which we haven't actually said, but think about consoles and where they live in terms of price point having something at six teraflops that will get millions of people buying it is very attractive to some of the VR companies that are out there already, and we've architected it such that something will be able to plug right in and work."

If we take a look at what a VR-ready PC costs on the low end, about $800-$900 or about £600, I expect Project Scorpio to be around that price. That's a lot of money for a console, especially compared to the just-announced Xbox One S which costs $299 (£249) for the base model.


Project Scorpio Xbox Revealed: 7 Reasons You Need a Project Scorpio Xbox One



I will keep any updates i come across down below

Xbox Scorpios dev kit revealed
Following last weeks unveiling of the Xbox Scorpios guts to Digital Foundry, Microsoft has revealed the consoles developer kit to Gamasutra. The hardware specifications of the Scorpio dev kit are, as expected, slightly better than those of the system itself, but Microsoft told Gamasutra that it made a major effort to design the dev kit in a way that would make developers lives easier.

Last week, we learned the basic specs for Scorpio as it will be released this holiday season: an eight-core CPU at 2.3 GHz, a GPU with 40 Radeon compute units at 1172 MHz, 12 GB of GDDR5 RAM with a bandwidth of 326 GB/s all of which will meet Microsofts stated performance target of 6 teraflops of computing power. Gamasutra reports that Microsoft bumped up the specs a bit for Scorpios dev kit: Its GPU features 44 compute units to deliver 6.6 teraflops of performance, and its RAM is doubled to 24 GB. It also contains a 1 TB SSD alongside the standard 1 TB hard drive.
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At a high level, its much easier for a game developer to come in higher and tune down, than come in lower and tune up. Or nail it. That just rarely happens, said Kevin Gammill, group product director of the Xbox platform, in an interview with Gamasutra. Indeed, game makers often use development hardware that is more powerful than their final target, and then scale performance down to meet that level.
That target for Scorpio is native 4K gaming: Gammill told Digital Foundry that the goal is that any 900p or better title [on Xbox One] would be able to easily run at frame-rate at 4K on Scorpio. In addition to focusing on compatibility with the latest and greatest in TV technology 4K resolution, high dynamic range and wide color gamut Microsoft sought to future-proof Scorpio by building in support for two standards that havent yet arrived in the living room.

Scorpio will support variable refresh rate displays via HDMI 2.1 variable refresh rate is built into the HDMI 2.1 specification, but the recently announced standard hasnt been ratified yet and AMD FreeSync. While some computer monitors today offer a variable refresh rate via FreeSync or Nvidias proprietary G-Sync technology, there arent any televisions that support the feature at this point. But they will likely be available in the near future, and when they arrive, Scorpio will be ready for them. (Displays with a variable refresh rate can sync directly on a frame-by-frame basis with the video output of a source, like a computer or game console, which makes v-sync unnecessary and eliminates issues such as screen tearing, stuttering and input lag.)




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