Well, it’s been a rollercoaster week, full of hype and anticipation. Eurogamer, after visiting the Microsoft campus to have a close encounter with the Scorpio design team, has revealed scrumptious details about the upcoming monster of a console. The console, which will launch in Q4 2017 was revealed to be in development at E3 2016 and have been the object of massive speculation.
To get it out of the way, the Xbox Project Scorpio will not feature the current Ryzen or Vega technologies, however, Richard over at Eurogamer reiterated that the system design Microsoft opted for was more complicated and in some ways surprising to what one would expect from a console. The base CPU is based on the Jaguar chip present in the Xbox One S but redesigned to work with DirectX 12 natively. According to Eurogamer, the CPU draw calls have been optimized by massive margins. Draw calls that would usually take thousands of instructions have been reduced to just 11.
The system, as we already know will feature 12GB of DDR5 memory, which improves the overall drawback which the original Xbox One had, which had 8GB of DDR3 memory with an integrated ESRAM block. The system, however, retains Xbox backward compatibility with Xbox One games by virtualization of the ESRAM, which means you will have little to no issues running games you already own.
The GPU is also a new custom designed chipset from the Microsoft engineers. The original Xbox One features just 12 GCN units, and the Xbox One Scorpio dials this up to eleven by featuring 40 GCU’s, which runs at 1172MHz each. Microsoft promised that this system is so efficient and powerful that it should run a majority of titles at 4K 60FPS with room to spare, thanks to a demo Eurogamer saw of Forza Motorsport 6 running at 4K 60FPS with 70% utilization.
The cooling system is also custom engineered by Microsoft, which utilizes a water cooled design so intricate that it surprised the guys over at Eurogamer so much they called it ‘revolutionary’.
Microsoft hasn’t announced any naming changes, or the price yet, but based on this information, we speculate that the console should retail for around $399 in the US.
Keep to ICXM for more news as it develops.
Dreyer was a regular ICXM contributor between 2016–2017, publishing 139 articles across opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news. Their work focused on hands-on reviews, platform commentary, and breaking-news reporting during the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative. They post on X as @dreyer_smit.