Project Scorpio has been shrouded in mystery since its announcement. A lot of people, myself included, have never really been sure what it is, which isn’t helped by Xbox changing their tune whenever asked. We know it’s a console, but what makes it special? Why do we need to change again so soon?
Luckily, thanks to Eurogamer and their Digital Foundry team, it’s never been clearer what Scorpio is and what it can do. It looks like it me might be quite the beast of a home gaming machine.
Here are the Project Scorpio Xbox specs and various other details:
– The CPU has eight custom x86 cores clocked at 2.3GHz. That is roughly 30% faster than the One, but still not incredibly powerful.
– The GPU has 40 customised compute units clocked at 1172MHz, allowing for 6 teraflops as Microsoft once claimed. That’s four times more powerful than the One
– 4GB of memory is allocated to the Scorpio itself with games having 8GB to use, 3GB up from the One
– 12GB of GDDR5 RAM, with a memory bandwidth of 326GB/s.
– A faster 1TB 2.5-inch hard drive
– Equipped with a UHD Blu-ray drive
– Has the same input/output ports as the One
According to the testers, a ForzaTech demo allowed them to reach 60fps at 4K. However, they were quick to stress that it was incredibly well optimised and that it might not be applicable to all games. The console will also allow Xbox One and 360 games to run much, much better with 3GB of RAM pushing up performance. It may even allow those games to reach 4K.
As for the competition, it looks like Scorpio dumps all over PS4 Pro in terms of specs. Of course, and this is something always worth remembering instead of numbers, what matters is how it actually handles games, not just in theory.
There’s no release date, price point, or even official name for Scorpio just yet. All things considered, it looks good, but keep your hype restrained until closer to launch. For all the positives in Digital Foundry’s reports, you never really know how well retail units will perform until they’re on shelves. Also, Microsoft paid for Eurogamer’s travel expenses, so that makes me instantly wary.
What do you think? Pop your thoughts in the comment section below.
Some of the coverage you find on Cultured Vultures contains affiliate links, which provide us with small commissions based on purchases made from visiting our site.
