Steam comes out with their hardware survey every now and then which gives us a look at what setups different PC gamers are using. If you look at the processor, VRAM, memory and core count, it’s clear that the majority of PC gamers don’t have powerful machines which can achieve 4K visuals even at 30 FPS. Just take a look at the specifications provided by Steam. Thank you Showan Watson for the chart.
The majority of these computers can achieve 1080p visuals and some higher resolutions but 4K is out of reach. This gives Project Scorpio, if marketed right, the chance to attract many buyers from the PC crowd because they’ll be able to purchase a native 4K-capable device at the fraction of the cost of upgrading their gaming machines. It’s not just a matter of upgrading the GPU here, the majority of gamers would also have to upgrade their RAM and processor. That adds up to a lot more than any console ever costs. Hopefully Microsoft will market Project Scorpio correctly to take advantage of this space in the market.
Additional Information
According to Eurogamer, here are the rumored specifications of Project Scorpio:
• 8-core CPU
• Up to 60 GCN compute units GPU at around 850 MHz
• 12 GB GDDR5 RAM
• 6 TFLOPS GPU
• 320 GB/s memory speed
This information was provided by Microsoft or revealed through an analysis of leaked white papers or images.
Asher is a games journalist, former News Writer (Gaming) at Windows Central. They contributed 1110 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: wrote over 1,100 ICXM pieces on Xbox news, hardware reviews, and platform commentary before joining Future plc’s Windows Central in 2017.