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Digital Foundry: Xbox Scorpio

Kaako

Felium Defensor
Show me how it's a direct copied jag CPU just put in there?

Everything in DF article states a revised customized CPU. They may have started with a jag but they went through many revisions and redesigns.

It's not vanilla jag cores
Hahaha.
 

phant0m

Member
If MS really wants to win, just let Valve make a Steam Link UWP app that can connect to Steam libraries in Big Picture mode. I know it's counter-productive to the Xbox ecosystem, but Play Anywhere is already a step in that direction.

I think a lot of people will find a console that can stream your entire PC library, do 4K media playback and also play console exclusives very compelling.
 

UCBooties

Member
Welcome to the life of a pc gamer. Technology will start moving so fast, best advice I can give you is to just buy the best available when you are in the market for a new machine. There will ALWAYS be something better coming. I'm certain PlayStation will have some kind of answer to this within a couple years.

I doubt that Sony is going to push a new SKU until they're ready to move the PS5. Even if the Scorpio is significantly more powerful than the Pro, which it seems to be, Sony has the market share, the developer support, and the momentum to ride out this generation. Microsoft needs this to convince a lot of current PS4 owners to jump ship, not just get upgrades from people already in the XBox ecosystem. That's why they are talking about winning back developers, they know they need software support to sell the beefed up hardware. Sony doesn't need (and can't afford) to offer another mid-gen SKU to compete.
 

DenogginizerOS

BenjaminBirdie's Thomas Jefferson
I can't find it in any of the articles, so I will ask here. Do we know if XB1 controllers will work with Scorpio. I am strongly inclined to say yes, but I haven't seen any mention of it in these articles.
 
But that's not how the mobile phone/tablet market works. Software gets gated off eventually for hardware that's truly too old to manage, but not in 24 months or anything close to that.
Yes but you have hardware generations in that market that only last a year and therefor a longer cycling period for older devices. This is the only hardware coming from Sony and Microsoft for the next 3-4 years, the logical step would be mid cycle of each generational update you start eliminating support for legacy hardware
 

Kaji AF16

Member
Interesting proposal if it doesn´t surpass the $450 mark.

It sounds well-design and directly aimed at those interested in the "horsepower race" but not willing to play on PC. I am curious on how many among the console "harcore" market will it bring back from Sony´s share.

I will ultimately stay in the Xbox ecosystem because of several factors (including friends and exclusives), but I can´t yet tell if I will be an early adopter of Scorpio.
By the way, I believe they should keep this name.
 

Busty

Banned
Im glad this console delivered spec wise after the disappointment that ps4pro was

Let's see how marvellous the Scorpio can be if it's hampered by the fact all it's games have to be backwardly compatible with the original Xbone.

It's all very well iterating on the hardware but you cannot do so at the expense of all those who bought the original console and don't intend to upgrade.

As alien a concept as this it to GAF these are the people who make up the majority of the gaming public.
 

Lady Gaia

Member
guestimate from Richard
but yeah Xbox Scorpio is more expensive to manufacture than a Ps4 Pro (not that much, but still)

There's not much difference in die size, it's true, so the cost per unit is pretty similar. Given the high clock speed targets, though, the difference in cost per working unit could be more dramatic.

It's still hard to extrapolate the entire system cost. 12GB DDR5 is an obvious source of ~$35 in additional costs over the PS4 Pro, but increases in power consumption and cooling requirements are where it gets much less obvious. The increase in GPU clock speeds alone could result in TDP roughly double the PS4 Pro, so the work Microsoft has done on carefully tuning power draw will be important. Even so, it'll be fascinating to see how they cope with heat and power draw in a consumer product with these aggressive performance targets.

All in all, no real surprises from this reveal. It still looks like a really solid hardware effort that will help but isn't sufficient on its own to turn Microsoft's fortunes around. What we see at E3 will have to complement the hardware story and then things could get very interesting indeed.
 
I know im in the minority, but I think its a huge bummer this is the direction they have taken (Sony too). Pumping out the same-ish visuals at a huge resolution gain. Huge GPU, which they will use to improve resolution, instead of a better balance of CPU/GPU to improve game logic.

Id much rather have more complicated 1080p games with stellar effects than up-ressed 4K games.

I realize thats not how this all works though.
 
It's impressive what they said about Forza 6, but to be fair....that is a 2015 game. Are we truly going to get Native 4K/60fps in Battlefront 2 and Native 4K/30fps in games like RDR2, next AC game and all the other multiplats? And then as for exclusives....will Crackdown and Sea of Thieves be Native 4K?
 

Faustek

Member
Why are people complaining about the Jaguar CPU?
It's fully functional and it helps by lowering the breaking of compability as much as possible. Of course it would have been more fun to see a full on PC CPU and not a downclocked cpu but it's still fully capable for what console gaming is. If you really have a hangup on these things perhaps look into a gaming PC? It's much easier these past years to actually do. Unfortunately I only had 1 real problem these past 5 years and it was a monitor issue that was really rare.
 

Darklor01

Might need to stop sniffing glue
DF have gone out of their way in a few videos to state that the extra power is going to cost more. I also remember some hints from Microsoft that it would the extra power will come at a cost.

They are aware of the price of a PS4 Pro. It's not a secret. I think they may be hinting that it's going to cost more than the current price of the PS4. The current PS4 Pro price is $399.99 U.S.

Everything is speculation here, but I'm going to imagine that they know more than we do.
 

gofreak

GAF's Bob Woodward
Exactly they detailed that all the CPU core blocks are revised and customized. Again NOT jaguar.

If you take a Camaro and put a LS engine in it its not a camaro anymore

And if you put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig ;)

Most custom socs using a particular CPU type will customise it in some ways. Don't let that mislead you into overstating it as some other completely different type of CPU than the family it is of. From the DF commentary, it is a Jaguar, and most of the customisations referred to in the same breath are actually bits and bobs that aren't directly CPU stuff at all.

Jaguar doesn't mean one exact CPU btw. There are a variety of socs using Jaguars with different configs, but they're all 'Jaguar'.

I'm cautious of every supposed "revised" or "customized" part after what happened with the Switch

Or more to the point, Xbox One. The mountain-out-of-molehills wrt its 'customisations' and 'secret sauce' was embarrassing.

Scorpio is a nice enough machine to not need similar over-spin and obfuscation.
 

toosejuice786

Neo Member
MS is not in the business of allowing you to install steam on their consoles, so that you can bypass their ecosystem.
True but I don't think Steam games would run any better than the ones on the Scorpio. Think it would be great for video editing and other intensive tasks tho
 
What is MS enables some type of "GAME MODE" so that they free up more RAM for the game allowing up to 9GB!!!??

the extra 1gb of ram is for native 4k dashboard, but what about those with 1080p sets that do not want the downsampled 4k dashboard ?? hmmm hmmm???

HOW BOUH DAH?
I can see some optimization happening. Why not? It's totally possible.
 

Chobel

Member
It's impressive what they said about Forza 6, but to be fair....that is a 2015 game. Are we truly going to get Native 4K/60fps in Battlefront 2 and Native 4K/30fps in games like RDR2, next AC game and all the other multiplats? And then as for exclusives....will Crackdown and Sea of Thieves be Native 4K?

No idea about multipats, but MS said all their 1st party games will be 4K.
 

GameSeeker

Member
Is there a timeline for XBox TWO or PS5? I don't want to drop $x00.00 CDN on this only for the next gen to come out 20 months later.

That is an excellent question.

Sony's timing with PS4 Pro last year was half-way through the life cycle of PS4, exactly what you would expect from a mid-life kicker product.

If Sony has any business sense, they will have the PS5 coming out in Fall 2019, exactly 6 years after PS4 and 3 years after PS4 Pro. This strategy maintains a 6 year console life cycle. Sony is going to want to minimize the time Microsoft can claim to have the "highest performance console", so Sony is not going to wait till 2020.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has a dilemma. Scorpio is 4 years after Xbox One. If they launch Xbox Two in 2019 to keep up with Sony, the lifecycle of Scorpio is relatively short. If Microsoft waits till 2020 for Xbox Two, they give Sony a year head start.
 

Elios83

Member
yield improvements
more matured process
more free capacity from the foundry (16nm FF not used by Apples new IPhone anymore)
350mm² is more expensive to produce in September 2016 compared to September 2017

i talk about launch Ps4 Pro SOC vs launch Scorpio SOC

These benefits will be enjoyed by the Pro as well this year and will help Sony to cut the price of the system, they can't be a reason why it was worth to wait a year.
Every company every year take advantage of these things to cut the manufacturing costs of their electronics products.
Also the APU is just part of the total cost, it's interesting that Microsoft chose to keep the SOC complexity and die area relatively on par with the Pro but the burden of the higher clocks will be put on the cooling system and power supply which will need to be more expensive. It's always a balance.
 

ShapeGSX

Member
They will use the same textures. PC will also use the same textures. That way goes the game. The extra ram is for comfortable 4k I'm betting. My GPU never touch a lot of it's ram because I have a 1080p screen.

Actually, in the video, Richard said that the Forza port they did was using higher resolution textures for the Scorpio version.
 

Proelite

Member
Are we getting more articles coming in depth for the CPU and GPU customizations? Those are going to be interesting.

One thing really encouraging about consoles and MS consoles going forward is the high clock speeds. It almost matches the base clock speeds of shipping desktop counterparts. That bodes well for future consoles.


Another thing is that hardware customization seems to be cheap enough to be used for a mid gen refresh. This bodes well for consoles be unique hardware wise.
 
So they are going to price it at 499 one year after PS4 Pro's release. Considering by that time it has received a price drop to 349 and will likely be bundled with a game, that's an effective difference of around 200 bucks - I'm not sure this will convince the average gamer.

On the other hand, it sounds like an interesting piece of hardware. Let's see how all this turns out.
 

toosejuice786

Neo Member
That is an excellent question.

Sony's timing with PS4 Pro last year was half-way through the life cycle of PS4, exactly what you would expect from a mid-life kicker product.

If Sony has any business sense, they will have the PS5 coming out in Fall 2019, exactly 6 years after PS4 and 3 years after PS4 Pro. This strategy maintains a 6 year console life cycle. Sony is going to want to minimize the time Microsoft can claim to have the "highest performance console", so Sony is not going to wait till 2020.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has a dilemma. Scorpio is 4 years after Xbox One. If they launch Xbox Two in 2019 to keep up with Sony, the lifecycle of Scorpio is relatively short. If Microsoft waits till 2020 for Xbox Two, they give Sony a year head start.
Just like how the pro has given the Scorpio a head start 🤔
 
If MS really wants to win, just let Valve make a Steam Link UWP app that can connect to Steam libraries in Big Picture mode. I know it's counter-productive to the Xbox ecosystem, but Play Anywhere is already a step in that direction.

I think a lot of people will find a console that can stream your entire PC library, do 4K media playback and also play console exclusives very compelling.

Wut? Play Anywhere is not a step in that direction. Microsoft controls both the Xbox ecosystem and the Windows 10 Store. Play Anywhere is absolutely nothing like enabling Steam, a 3rd party that Microsoft has no control over and reaps no profits from, on Xbox.
 
Yes but you have hardware generations in that market that only last a year and therefor a longer cycling period for older devices. This is the only hardware coming from Sony and Microsoft for the next 3-4 years, the logical step would be mid cycle of each generational update you start eliminating support for legacy hardware

A bit presumptuous, don't you think? I could easily see Sony putting out a major new piece of hardware by fall 2019. I'd be kinda' surprised if they didn't, frankly.
 

scoobs

Member
I doubt that Sony is going to push a new SKU until they're ready to move the PS5. Even if the Scorpio is significantly more powerful than the Pro, which it seems to be, Sony has the market share, the developer support, and the momentum to ride out this generation. Microsoft needs this to convince a lot of current PS4 owners to jump ship, not just get upgrades from people already in the XBox ecosystem. That's why they are talking about winning back developers, they know they need software support to sell the beefed up hardware. Sony doesn't need (and can't afford) to offer another mid-gen SKU to compete.
Number one rule to staying on top is don't do nothing. Sony will have new hardware, then Xbox will have new hardware, etc.
 
That is an excellent question.

Sony's timing with PS4 Pro last year was half-way through the life cycle of PS4, exactly what you would expect from a mid-life kicker product.

If Sony has any business sense, they will have the PS5 coming out in Fall 2019, exactly 6 years after PS4 and 3 years after PS4 Pro. This strategy maintains a 6 year console life cycle. Sony is going to want to minimize the time Microsoft can claim to have the "highest performance console", so Sony is not going to wait till 2020.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has a dilemma. Scorpio is 4 years after Xbox One. If they launch Xbox Two in 2019 to keep up with Sony, the lifecycle of Scorpio is relatively short. If Microsoft waits till 2020 for Xbox Two, they give Sony a year head start.

At the same time, Sony knows they will make bank the longer they drag out the generation. I can see both PS5 and Scorpio 2 launching in 2020 due to this.
 

Munki

Member
Are we getting more articles coming in depth for the CPU and GPU customizations? Those are going to be interesting.

I believe they mentioned that in the DF video. But there definitely needs some clarification, especially the CPU side.
 
So guys,

What are the odds that Sony will 'announce' the "PS5" this E3, just as Microsoft announced Scorpio? They would only have to drop a few names like 'Zen & Vega based architecture' and 'fully backwards compatible' with PS4 / PS4 pro. They can ride on that hype easily if the "PS5" releases in november 2018. Then it would have been a 5 year cycle as well.

That would be a mistake by Sony. They already rushed PS4 Pro out thinking Scorpio would launch in Spring 2017 and that hurt their PS4 Slim and PSVR by having three devices to market for and sustain at the same time.
 
I can't find it in any of the articles, so I will ask here. Do we know if XB1 controllers will work with Scorpio. I am strongly inclined to say yes, but I haven't seen any mention of it in these articles.

Is this a joke post? Spencer has said in multiple interviews that game pads and such will work on Scorpio as indicated in this Gamespot article

All of your Xbox One games and controllers will work on the new Scorpio system when it comes out in 2017.
 
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