Update: Phil Spencer confirmed the console could do native 4K contrary to rumors perpetuated by Eurogamer. Apart from that, a fan asked him if he could provide an explanation for the rumors started by the outlet, Spencer said that Xbox Scorpio’s visuals would do the explaining themselves when they’re revealed. He’s confident about them.
It looks like Eurogamer got their hands on an old white paper from Microsoft which talks about the Xbox Scorpio. While much of Eurogamer’s report is based on speculation and is, quite frankly, a little ridiculous because they’re damage-controlling the PlayStation 4 Pro when developers consider Xbox Scorpio a generational leap, they do point out one major change in the upcoming console. Xbox Scorpio does away with ESRAM which is a hallmark of past Xbox consoles. The Xbox 360 had a variation of it and the Xbox One and Xbox One S rely on it to achieve high performance for many video games.
According to Eurogamer, the console does away with ESRAM because the base memory is faster than ESRAM. This is definitely exciting news for gamers and developers. We can expect higher quality effects and frame rates while developers don’t have to worry about doing coding gymnastics with the ESRAM. Aside from that, the rest is just pure speculation. Remember that this is an early white paper and considerable changes have been made to the console since then from what I understand. Windows Central’s Jez Corden saw similar documents and can attest to the changes. We’ll see what the final product looks like but the fact alone that the console’s memory is faster than ESRAM is encouraging.
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.