LelouchZero
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Gamasutra have released their article about Project Scorpio, it features very interesting details about the new system from a game development perspective.
Interestingly the dev kit features a GPU with 44 compute units, a total of 2816 cores at a clock speed of 1172MHz for a capability of 6.6 TF.
(Compared to the 2560 core, 6 TF retail model).
It also features 2x the amount of memory, for a total of 24GB of GDDR5 memory in the dev kit.
This is a render of the dev kit:
The direction console gaming is going is very interesting, as developers are no longer only building games for one hardware configuration, they're also building them for the newer machines.
It's possible that the retail model may share design similarities with the dev kit, as the previous dev kits share design similarities with their retail counterparts.
The Xbox team have really listened to the desires of the community, this is wonderful!
Microsoft's Xbox One turns four this year. Before the year is out, the company plans to provide its aging console with a beefier, more capable sibling: Project Scorpio.
It's been about a year since news of the company's plans to breathe new life into the brand leaked, but Xbox chief Phil Spencer traces Scorpio's roots back to 2014, shortly after he stepped up from head of Microsoft Studios to become head of Xbox.
Gamasutra have released their article about Project Scorpio, it features very interesting details about the new system from a game development perspective.
Interestingly the dev kit features a GPU with 44 compute units, a total of 2816 cores at a clock speed of 1172MHz for a capability of 6.6 TF.
(Compared to the 2560 core, 6 TF retail model).
It also features 2x the amount of memory, for a total of 24GB of GDDR5 memory in the dev kit.
It's also more powerful than the retail console: 44 CUs on the GPU instead of 40, 24 GB of DDR5 RAM (double retail's 12 GB), and a 1 TB solid-state drive in addition to the retail console's 1 TB hard drive. Microsoft's pitch to devs is consistent here: build your games big (4K native textures, etc.) and tune them down to run on the Scorpio and other Xbox One consoles.
This is a render of the dev kit:
A render of the dev kit with the front display showing build performance data. When asked how long it would be before a dev got Doom running on the display, Microsoft representatives declined to speculate.
The direction console gaming is going is very interesting, as developers are no longer only building games for one hardware configuration, they're also building them for the newer machines.
Console game devs must now think like PC game devs
The limits and comforts of having a single device to target are gone; in their place, developers who make games for Xbox must now think like PC game devs, building their games to scale across at least two significantly different hardware configurations.
This is not a new challenge, of course; Sony beat Microsoft to the punch by releasing its own supercharged PlayStation 4, the PlayStation 4 Pro. late last year -- along with a mandate to devs that all PS4 games launching after the Pro be capable of supporting its beefier specs in some fashion. When we spoke to PS4 system architect Mark Cerny last year about the Pro, he said Sony was also having ”conversations" with devs about patching their extant games to support the Pro. Some games were patched, but many had compatibility issues with the Pro; Sony eventually patched a ”Boost Mode" into the console this year that sees some games gaining increased performance on the Pro, even if they don't officially support the beefier console.
All of this is important because Microsoft is making a show of avoiding the compatibility problem entirely. The pitch to game developers, according to Xbox software engineering exec Kareem Choudhry, is that you don't have to do anything to your existing or future Xbox One games to get them running better on Scorpio -- they just will.
”You can just write to the original set of [Xbox One] requirements that we have today, and then we'll do the work to make sure that it actually runs better. But [developers] don't have to do any custom work for Scorpio," Choudhry told Gamasutra. ”We're just inviting people to come in and take advantage of it. In terms of requirements if they do decide to take advantage of it, we want that content to run, at minimum the same as but ideally better than it does on the original Xbox One.”
Microsoft's pitch to developers, then, is that Scorpio is to Xbox One as a recommended PC system spec is to a minimum PC system spec; the components are more powerful, but the underlying platform is the same.
It's possible that the retail model may share design similarities with the dev kit, as the previous dev kits share design similarities with their retail counterparts.
The Xbox team have really listened to the desires of the community, this is wonderful!