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Digital Foundry: Xbox Scorpio

MaxiLive

Member
You know what would be shocking to me? If the following series of events played out:

  • Phil Spencer goes on stage at E3 2013 and announces that the price of the Xbox One would be $499 and receives the live audience equivilant of a record player scratch stop
  • The sales of the Xbox One were so poor due to a number of issues but chief among them the fact that they were priced well above Sony
  • Phil Spencer and team choose to remove Kinect in order to sell the Xbox One at the same price as the PS4 and possibly save the Xbox business
  • A couple of years go by and they decide to create a new, more powerful console as a pillar for the future of the brand
  • During the first step of the design phase, Phil Spencer gets up infront of his design team and says "We need to target a price of.... $499"

The difference this time is they will still have the Xbox One S which will do a good enough job at running all the new releases that come out for the Xbox brand and will be very reasonably priced. May even see an Xbox Scorpio mini released as a refresh and to keep the styling the same.

Then the Scorpio is the premium console for core gamers who want the best gaming experience. The market has been changing over the past few years with more focus on core gamers, premium hardware and e-sports. Rather than motion control, budget hardware and casual market.
 

Durante

Member
It's interesting they seemed to have gone with a pretty different architecture compared with the Xbone.

I mean we knew they were forced to if they wanted it future proof, what with the eSRAM workaround in the One being outdated, but it goes a lot further than just that.

That means optimization will cost pubs a lot more than going from PS4 to PS4Pro, and we already saw that a lot of pubs weren't really bothered with that until Sony created the forced boost mode feature.
Why? By any real metric I'd say it's a more mainstream architecture than XB1.
Being the only platform with a user-managed SRAM pool was much more of an optimization liability.
 

jaypah

Member
Your not reading my post right, I am saying racing game genre is NOT a good benchmark for gaming power.

Wake me up and lets talk when a console can do Witcher 3 at 60 FPS, thats all I want, looks like we will have to wait until next gen to get 60 FPS gaming on AAA open world games.

Scorpio looks good, but Sony could of dumped at Vortex cooler on the Pro and upped the specs last year, I have 2 Ps4 pro and 1080 vs 4K is nice but I want more frame rate power.

Good job MS but it looks like ZEN is just too big a beast for consoles in 2017

Then get a PC. Next gen you will get more blades of grass and higher textures. Devs don't care much for framerate on consoles, they spend power elsewhere. Console makers don't seem keen on/able to use comparatively fast CPUs.
 

mcrommert

Banned
It's interesting they seemed to have gone with a pretty different architecture compared with the Xbone.

I mean we knew they were forced to if they wanted it future proof, what with the eSRAM workaround in the One being outdated, but it goes a lot further than just that.

That means optimization will cost pubs a lot more than going from PS4 to PS4Pro, and we already saw that a lot of pubs weren't really bothered with that until Sony created the forced boost mode feature.

It's impressive technology, but for now I don't really see who buys it except the people who just want bragging rights. Which admittedly is a not negligible part of the gaming community, but still.

I want a pc quality gaming experience on a console... So it's perfect
 

Baleoce

Member
The CPU is built with specific optimizations for certain games/engines. So it's awesome that they got it to run so quickly but it might not be representative from what you would see from every game.

That's very true. It will be interesting to see how well a broad range of engines scale initially to 4k on this.
 

geordiemp

Member
It's not "just" Jaguar though.

Stop downplaying.

It is Jaguar though, customised or special whatever but its Jaguar, remember recently the customised X1 special for Switch......Heavily customised lol

I just dont think AMD / Nvidia redesign hardware for such things, its massive undertaking, they just use there pre-defined and tested blocks and pull them together IMO.

I bet when the chip images come in the blocks look exactly like Jaguar....
 

Savantcore

Unconfirmed Member
It's their only real play and they pretty much have to do it at this point. Scorpio trounces the Pro in literally all areas. A $350 Pro vs. a $499 Scorpio this fall? That'd be nothing to sneeze at.

I think 'has to' is a bit negative. Microsoft now have the (much) more powerful console but Sony are still in charge.

Cut the price of the Pro and Slim PS4, make sure the release calendar is still tight, and the sales will keep on trucking on.
 
This ^^

I mean, 6TF is what we expected. I haven't gone through all the info yet but so far, has anything in this reveal been a surprise?

I mean, it's all incredibly impressive, for a current gen console. Like the Pro, it's a great option for console gamers who are looking into 4k. Beyond that, it's still a console, just a very good console.
 

Sony

Nintendo
I also wonder why they increased the memory availability for the OS/Dashboard now that Snap/Pip are gone.
 

tuxfool

Banned
This ^^

I mean, 6TF is what we expected. I haven't gone through all the info yet but so far, has anything in this reveal been a surprise?

I don't understand why people expected some great big reveal here?

Most of this stuff was known and expected. It is nice to have some more detail, but going into this, that is all I expected out of this coverage.
 

SDCowboy

Member
I don't get why some are suggesting this is a new console gen for them. Doesn't this still uses Xbox One games as its games? How is this not still a part of the Xbone ecosystem?
 

Kazuo Hirai

I really want everyone to know how much more Titanfall 2 sold than Nioh. It was a staggering amount.
This. A hundred thousand times this.
If the Scorpio is going to be a higher-res Gears,Halo and Forza machine for another gen then I'm 100% out.
When someone post this, I'am very confused.
Why you so confident that...






Gears has a future?
 

Space_nut

Member
Digital Foundry
As a result, at a base level, we anticipate third party releases where Scorpio enjoys higher resolutions and more detailed art, but the scale of the difference is something we can't draw definitive conclusions on until we start to see games. The best case scenario for Microsoft is that its CPU and GPU hardware customisation - derived directly from granular analysis of existing game engines - will produce a gulf in results even wider than those seen frequently seen in Xbox One/PS4 cross-platform releases.

Hmm a larger graphical gulp than Xbox One/PS4

Soooooooo goooooood :)
 
That's a massive leap

I wonder how they will approach this.

Come out and say it's a new generation or something who knows.
it's not a generational leap. it is designed to run games at xbox one quality or higher at native 4k.

next gen would hopefully be better than current gen fidelity + native 4k.
 
Please MS have a simaltaneous release with Destiny 2. I am going to be buying it anyway, but that wait while playing on old not very good hardware will be agonizing.
 

Not Drake

Member
Yeah but during the same period they will have a console that can play the same games at lower performance for a lower dollar cost to the consumer this means that when it comes time to launch consumers will have the choice of either the premium product or the basic one.

This is like that infamous Mattrick's line lol

you're not wrong though
 
Someone break this down for me;

Processing draw calls - effectively telling the graphics hardware what to draw - is one of the most important tasks the CPU carries out. It can suck up a lot of processor resources, a pipeline that traditionally takes thousands - perhaps hundreds of thousands - of CPU instructions. With Scorpio's hardware offload, any draw call can be executed with just 11 instructions, and just nine for a state change.

Wouldn't this mean a lot more than just 'a custom 2.3ghz' cpu?
 
I also wonder why they increased the memory availability for the OS/Dashboard now that Snap/Pip are gone.

Didn't they say in the article? I thought I saw something about the extra memory being available to push to UI up to 4K. Not sure what that means for 1080p sets though.
 

Gator86

Member
It can do 4k native 60fps. CONFIRMED

So can any console technically? It'll be interesting to see what this thing does with real games and 3rd parties in the next few years. Are we going to see 60fps versions of games normally running 30, like random Ubisoft open-world games and such?
 

vg260

Member
I've not read all 17 pages of this thread, but am I the only one who thought DF (Leadbetter) was a little too enthusiastic about this reveal?

I mean, I love new hardware, and who doesn't like tech specs, but this particular coverage just seems overly glowing. I'm sure it was a condition of their privileged access, but I'm still taking all this with a large dose of salt.

They're tech geeks, this is the type of analysis they do for a living, and they get to reveal all the tech info first. Why wouldn't they get excited?
 

leeh

Member
Guys & Gals, since the GPU is clocked at a ridiculous rate, this is very good isn't it, as the entire GPU benefits from this and it's not just benefiting from a higher CU count for example?

Or am I completely off the mark?
 

Proelite

Member
It is Jaguar though, customised or special whatever but its Jaguar, remember recently the customised X1 special for Switch......Heavily customised lol

I just dont think AMD / Nvidia redesign hardware for such things, its massive undertaking, they just use there pre-defined and tested blocks and pull them together IMO.

I bet when the chip images come in the blocks look exactly like Jaguar....

Technically, Jaguars can't hit 2.3 GHz. There is probably some silicon changes.
 

Duxxy3

Member
Yeah but during the same period they will have a console that can play the same games at lower performance for a lower dollar cost to the consumer this means that when it comes time to launch consumers will have the choice of either the premium product or the basic one.

If there's (upwards) of a $300 gap between the XB1S and Scorpio, I don't think new owners will even give Scorpio a second look.

$399 should be the target price. It's a year since the PS4 pro launch and the PS4 pro will likely drop $50 or $100.
 
Why would they keep talking about it being a "premium" console for OCD gamers who need the absolute best experience (my paraphrase) if it's going to cost the same as every console has for the last ten years?

Get ready for $499, boys . . .
 

00ich

Member
Doesn't matter if it's optimised or not, CPU is still doing less even if you optimise it. Like in the video, it's only for DX12 games, which more are these days.

So you are saying future games will run 33% slower on the original Xbox One, because they are all Direct3D 12 now?

Don't get me wrong. It's a great improvement that smaller developers can code according to specs and get good performance on Scorpio, but the 50% figure will not translate into AAA games.

Microsoft pulled that same stunt with draw calls and DirectX 10. That was supposed to reduce draw call overhead and did it technically, but everyone on Direct 9 had already coded around the DX9 API limitations.
 
It can do 4k native 60fps. CONFIRMED

Eh well see, itd be nice, and this thing seems
Powerful, but there are pc's that struggle to reach 4k 60 without the current highest end part, and this thing wont touch
What a 1080 ti is doing. I think 1080p 60 on a lot of titles is
More likely with the option to go up to 2160 native at the cost of a cut in half frame rate. The reason turn ten can achieve it is because there games and engine scale extremely well and it being a racing game means you are in a
Much more controlled enviroment than say your typical open world.
 
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