Microsoft has shown off their next range of Xbox technology called Project Scorpio. The aim is to provide gamers with an experience that their 4K television can achieve. Sony’s PlayStation 4 is currently the console of choice for a lot of gamers and Microsoft want to get more gamers using their devices.
Project Scorpio Specs
The specs of Project Scorpio are impressive and looks like being the most powerful console on the market when it’s released. The CPU used in Project Scorpio is eight custom x86 cores clocked at 3.3GHz; The GPU has 40 customised compute units at 1172MHz. The memory is 12GM GDDR5 RAM; Memory bandwidth is 326GB/s; Internal hard drive memory is 1TB 2.5-inch, and the optical drive is a 4K UHD Blu-ray.
Project Scorpio’s aim is to do as much as it can with 4K than just make everything look pretty. According to Kevin Gammill, Group Program Director of the Xbox Core Program, “To me, [4K] means a very specific set of things. It’s a lot more than delivering those eight-million-plus pixels to the screen while playing games. It’s about delivering those pixels with 4K assets, so they look great. It’s about delivering those pixels with HDR and wide colour gamut fidelity. It’s about delivering those pixels with no loss of frame rate compared to the 1080p version of that title – that’s super-important to us. Spatial audio adds to the immersive experience as well: to truly land that gameplay experience, it’s not just about what you see, but what you hear.”
Being Compatible and Fast
An important part of the process was a developer tool call Performance Investigator for Xbox. PIX, as it’s known, can do GPU trace capture to improve how the Xbox’s hardware works. This improves the visual aspects of a game. Microsoft wanted the new technology to be backwards compatible with older games, a feature that is important to many gamers.
Working with developers, a way to configure the number of CUs, Clock, memory bandwidth, the number of render back ends, the number of shader engines and the cache size. The will learn to create the best settings for the top selling games.
Scorpio’s engine has changed the Xbox’s 40 Radeon compute units from 853MHz to 1172MHz. The performance target was 6.0 teraflops for the GPU. This looks like something Microsoft has achieved. The eight cores of the CPU are organised in two clustered of 4MB of L2 cache.
Project Scorpio is running ahead of schedule, but its release date is still unknown.
Source: Eurogamer
