Microsoft reveals Xbox Project Scorpio’s hardware specs. Most powerful console ever, or something.
Today, Microsoft revealed the specs for Project Scorpio. It is, as you may imagine, the most powerful console ever. But, since like, it doesn’t carry any exclusives I give a fuck about, I’m going to end up passing for now.
Microsoft previously revealed some Project Scorpio specifications, but today the company is unveiling a lot more, thanks to Digital Foundry. Eurogamer’s separate vertical, that focuses analysis on the speeds-and-feeds of gaming PCs and consoles, has published a big overview of the graphical power of Microsoft’s next Xbox console.
So far, we’ve known that Project Scorpio will run at 6 teraflops, ahead of its main competitor the PlayStation 4 Pro with 4.2 teraflops of graphical power. Microsoft also plans to replace its 8GB of DDR3 RAM / 32MB of ESRAM with 12GB of GDDR5 memory on Project Scorpio. While many had hoped Microsoft would transition to AMD’s latest Ryzen CPU architecture, Digital Foundry has revealed that the company is sticking with a custom Jaguar-based processor.
AMD first released Jaguar processors back in 2013, and Microsoft’s original Xbox One and Sony’s PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 4 Pro both use chips based on the Jaguar microarchitecture. Even so, the new x86 cores in Scorpio are 31 percent faster than the Xbox One’s, and Microsoft’s reluctance to move to Ryzen might not actually mean much. Digital Foundry reveals that Microsoft’s custom GPU engine on Project Scorpio runs at an impressive 1172MHz, that’s a big increase over both the Xbox One’s 853MHz and the PS4 Pro’s 911MHz.
Microsoft is promising to do a lot with this power, and the company believes 900p and 1080p Xbox One games should be able to run at native 4K on Project Scorpio. According to the report, all Xbox One and Xbox 360 games will see a noticeable performance boost. This stands in contrast with the PS4 Pro, which recently received a Boost Mode that added minor improvements to some PS4 games, and requires custom patches for significant upgrades to each game.