Microsoft’s Scorpio is expected to shock and awe everyone with its extreme specs. We had that much clear early on thanks to the rumor mill. However, in a departure from the general trend, Microsoft has actually shared some more concrete details about the Project Scorpio device and we can now solemnly hold our hands over our heats and say “It is pretty powerful.
The device is expected to be unveiled at the E3 event in June. However, Microsoft condescended to assuage the extreme anticipation of gamers and let us have a peek at what the spec-sheet of the device looks like. In communication with Digital Foundry, Microsoft communicated some of the finer points about the device. For instance, with 6 Teraflops of processing power, the Scorpio is almost 4.5 times more powerful than an Xbox One, and 1.4 time more powerful than a PlayStation 4 Pro.
However, even that was not going to be enough to back up the company’s claims of allowing 4K game play at 60 frames per second. So what the company has done, is that it has worked with AMD to insert 40 customized Radeon compute units in a single chip manufactured by TSMC. This has enabled it to give its systems a huge boost. Just FYI, the aforementioned chip is capable of running at a staggering 1172 MHz.
CPU wise, you have an eight-core central processing unit that managed to clock at almost 2.3GHz. Even with 4GB of RAM reserved for the operating system, you still have 8 GB remaining to power up your games. Microsoft has also bumped up the memory bandwidth to 326GB/s. And Direct3D 12 APIs have been optimized so as to ensure that API calls are handled natively by the GPU. The device is also bringing along a 4K Blu-ray player and the same deployed in Xbox One S with a bunch of added enhancements.
The device is slated to come without a Kinect port, so there is a slight disappointment there. As far as the ensemble of games available on the platform is concerned, the device will support all Xbox One titles. The only difference will be an improved gameplay experience because of enhanced graphics. So basically, games are going to be more fun to play on this console. Whether that is going to be reason enough to shell out the hundreds of dollars Microsoft will undoubtedly ask for this premium device, is a question best reserved for after the E3 event in June, where Microsoft is expected to go into greater detail.
Here is a video, courtesy Digital Foundry:
