To be fair, I’m pretty sure that won’t be the narrative going forward. I said as much early on. Yes, 4K is going to be a big focus, but just like the PS4 Pro, the added “oomph” of the Scorpio will offer a lot more than just 4K for most games.
Also, while the PS4 Pro does do some cool stuff on my 1080p TV, it’s not really that noticeable or groundbreaking. Especially since the Pro can’t enable anything new for gameplay.
So with Scorpio being significantly more powerful than the PS4 Pro, that extra power is even less diminishing returns for a 1080p TV.
Well, sure. Obviously he was trying not to Osborne the XboneS.
The Xbone/XboneS aren’t capable of 1080p 60fps in modern games. The PS4 was closer, but wasn’t capable either. The PS4 Pro is, and the Scorpio will be too. The difference between 900p and 1080p may not be immediately noticeable 10 feet away in motion, but the jump to 60fps certainly is.
Based on spec leaks, the Scorpio should be fast enough to run games at 4k and downscale them to 1080p, offering far superior image quality, too.
The rumor is DF was going to run a huge leak about all the specs until MS offered them an exclusive if they would hold off a bit.
That’s actually my plan. Scorpio + black Friday 4k tv & updated receiver capable of hdmi 2.0a (or 2.1 hopefully by then)
Light reading for this afternoon:
There’ll be all the specs you’ll need in this piece, but the reason Microsoft flew us out to talk to those involved was straightforward: the numbers, as impressive as they are, don’t fully represent what the final product aims to deliver. Nor can the number of compute units and teraflops represent the passion the Xbox team has injected into this project. Microsoft has a point to prove. It’s not just about performance, it’s about pushing the quality of console design to a new level - in all areas.
The headlines? Combining smart design with sheer horsepower, Project Scorpio hits the six-teraflop target set for it as E3 last year, thanks to a custom GPU that has been designed from the ground up for optimal performance on today’s game engines - and that runs at an unprecedentedly high clock speed for a console. The GPU is paired with 12GB of fast GDDR5 memory and a custom eight-core CPU, and the whole thing is housed in a compact body with integrated power supply and, for a console, state-of-the-art cooling.
Performance is remarkable. We saw a Forza Motorsport demo running on the machine at native 4K and Xbox One equivalent settings, and it hit 60 frames per second with a substantial performance overhead - suggesting Scorpio will hit its native 4K target across a range of content, with power to spare to spend on other visual improvements. And while 4K is the target, Microsoft is paying attention to 1080p users, promising that all modes will be available to them.
Opinion and analysis:
Comparison between the specs of Scorpio and PS4 Pro:
CPU
- Scorpio - 8 custom cores (described as “evolved” Jaguar cores) clocked at 2.3 GHZ (x86)
- PS4 Pro - 8 Jaguar cores clocked at 2.1 GHZ
GPU
- Scorpio - 40 customized compute units at 1172 Mhz
- PS4 Pro - 36 improved GCN compute units at 911 Mhz
Memory and memory bandwidth
- Scorpio - 12 GB GDDR5, 326 GB/s bandwidth
- PS4 Pro - 8 GB GDDR5, 218 GB/s bandwidth
Hard drive
- Scorpio - 1 TB HDD
- PS4 Pro - 1 TB HDD
Optical Drive
- Scorpio - 4K UHD Blu-Ray
- PS4 Pro - Blu-Ray
And the specs article makes it sound like those custom CPU’s play very nice with Direct3D 12:
However, potentially the most exciting aspect surrounding the CPU revamp doesn’t actually relate to the processor blocks at all, but rather to the GPU command processor - the piece of hardware that receives instructions from the CPU, piping them through to the graphics core.
“We essentially moved Direct3D 12,” says Goossen. “We built that into the command processor of the GPU and what that means is that, for all the high frequency API invocations that the games do, they’ll all natively implemented in the logic of the command processor - and what this means is that our communication from the game to the GPU is super-efficient.”
Processing draw calls - effectively telling the graphics hardware what to draw - is one of the most important tasks the CPU carries out. It can suck up a lot of processor resources, a pipeline that traditionally takes thousands - perhaps hundreds of thousands - of CPU instructions. With Scorpio’s hardware offload, any draw call can be executed with just 11 instructions, and just nine for a state change.
“It’s a massive win for us and for the developers who’ve adopted D3D12 on Xbox, they’ve told us they’ve been able to cut their CPU rendering overhead by half, which is pretty amazing because now the driver portion of that is such a tiny fraction,” adds Goossen.
Between that, the surprisingly fast GPU and the amount of available RAM, it should indeed be a monster.
I wonder how they are going to keep it from sounding like a jet taking off though. They had to include high end cooling, but that still involves a fan having to dissipate all that heat.
I’m quite excited about today’s reveal and ready to upgrade my Day One edition when it becomes available.
Wendelius
I would be a little concerned about noise if that’s a factor. I love how absolutely silent my Xbox One is.
Indeed. Time will tell.
[quote]o cut a long story short, Microsoft is using a vapour chamber heat sink. It consists of a copper vessel that forms its basis, inside of which is ionised distilled water under vacuum. Heat is absorbed into the water, where it vapourises. The steam convects away from the hot spots and condenses on the heat sink fins. It’s highly efficient - but the heat still needs to be expelled from the system and the standard axial fans used on prior Xbox hardware wouldn’t cut the mustard.
“We went to a custom designed adapted centrifugal fan for this design,” Del Castillo continues. “It kind of looks like a supercharger on a car, it looks like an intercooler almost. Every part about this is custom designed for the application.”[/quote]
It all sounds very promising, though I’m nervous about the price. As long as it’s not stupid, this seems like a no-brainer as a trade-in. I get a 4K HDR Blu-Ray player out of it, and all my existing games (not that many, admittedly) get an upgrade.
As am I. This all sounds super-awesome, and good on Microsoft for impressing the analysts at DF, but I really need to see a price before I can figure out what to do.
Yeah, this sounds like a $600 box to me. Plus they stopped giving away free Kinect adapters to Xbox One S owners now, so if I want to hook up my old Kinect to this new machine, it will likely also require a $40 accessory.
Still, with my controller always pulling upwards these days, I’m so tired of having to pull out the batteries on the controller to watch Netflix properly. I might get a Scorpio box for my parents, since they have a 4K TV with HDR, and swap out the controller that comes with it and use it for my OG Xbox One. But it would have be $500 or below for that to happen.
Only skimmed through the article, but the bits I read surely sound like Microsoft made some fascinating hardware decisions. That said, the specs don’t really matter until Microsoft announces an appropriate software push at E3. The most recent news were more about which game got cancelled or allegedly cancelled.
And obviously, it’s nice to see all that horse power, but with Microsoft (for the time being) insisting on all games being able to run with the older configuration, it’ll be hard for devs to fully tap into the new feature set.
As for the price, I’d guess it’ll be not higher than $499. $599 still has the PS3 ring to it, and given that Microsoft is far behind Sony in terms of console hardware base this generation, they need to make a better offer than $600.
So yeah, E3 should be interesting.
As recommended before, you should consider getting one of the Xbox white controllers that also come with the One S, if you can. The improved grip is very nice and it’s only $48 on Amazon right now. I much prefer this version to the Day One and revised version with headphone jack controllers I also use at home.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01GW3H3U8/
Wendelius
Yep. My Xbone does make a fantastic Netflix/Youtube machine but I don’t need a souped up version to do that any better.
Harmony remotes can also control Xbone Netflix.
Sounds like a pretty impressive box for a console but if its more than $500(which itself is allot to ask) it will be DOA with a tiny fraction buying it. We had an “uber” console before in the Cell powered PS3 and it had the massively popular PlayStation brand to ride on yet it tanked at first.
The Scorpio does have the advantage of a huge amount of software ready to run on it from launch, whereas the PS3 was starved for content early on [insert twing-twang joke here]. But I agree that going over $500 takes it out of pre-order territory.