Online games outlet Gamasutra have revealed the official Project Scorpio development kit which, to our surprise, is very similar in design to the Xbox One S.
While, of course, this design will differ from the final consumer version, it’s amazing to see Microsoft packing so much power into such a small box. The dev kit also has a substantial boost in specs in order to run unoptimized code during game build testing.
Compared to the Scorpio’s 12GB of GDDR5 RAM, the development kit doubles that to 24GB, as well as increasing the 40 cuda-cores to 44 clocked at 1.172 GHz for a grand total of 6.6 teraflops. Instead of the traditional 1TB hard drive that consumers will find in their Scorpio, developers have access to that plus a 1TB SSD.
While you may be drooling for your chance to nab a development kit through whatever means, you should be aware that these are for development purposes only. Standard consumers will not be able to run retail games on console XDKs. Instead, the dev kit is limited to running just unsigned, in-development builds.
On top of this, AMD’s Corporate Vice President revealed that they will be partnering with Microsoft to bring virtual reality to Scorpio. The power in the base console should be more than enough for Scorpio’s VR potential to out-perform that of the PS4/PS4 Pro as well as mid-range PCs. E3 2017 should hopefully give us a look at just what Microsoft are planning when it comes to Scorpio VR support. Until then, however, we’ll keep you up to date with all news relating to Project Scorpio.
Lewis is a games journalist, freelance gaming and consumer-tech journalist. They contributed 344 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: has since served as Editor-in-Chief at StealthOptional and Gaming Editor at MSPoweruser, with bylines at Gfinity Esports and FRVR.