Xbox Scorpio: Not Every Game Will Run at 4k/60fps
The hype for Xbox Scorpio is real and one of the biggest reasons is its ability to run games at native 4K resolution. Widely considered to be the next big evolution in gaming it will be amazing to see games such as Forza Horizon 3, Gears of War 4 and more in 4K. It’s important to note, however, that not every game will reach that 4K/60fps on Xbox Scorpio. Not because the console won’t be able to handle it but because it’ll be up to the developers to make sure that their games can reach that plateau themselves.
In a recent interview with The Inner Circle, Microsoft Exec Albert Penello stated as much noting that if a developer thinks their game is best left at 1080p that’s totally fine. There will be no mandate coming from Microsoft that every game hits the 4K/60fps mark although it probably goes without saying that most developers will soon want to pump out the best possible experience they can manage. Read Penello’s full commentary on this below:
You have to have a goal. When you decide to do a piece of technology…when you want to launch, how much do you want it to cost…and there are all these decisions. At some point you have to say that this is what we want to do. So Phil kind of teased this up…we didn’t…and this is not a slam on anybody…we didn’t want to take a half step. Phil used to run studios and he is got all this studio guys and all these technology guys and he said if we are going to do this we need to make sure that we make a technology goal for ourselves.
So the goal was can we take the same level of graphics, the same frame rate, the same lighting effects, same number of enemies and AI on screen and deliver that in 4K. No compromises. I don’t have to half the number of enemies on screen, I don’t have to reduce the effects, I don’t have to make the game smaller. I should be able to take an Xbox One game today that is in 1080p and 60fps and I want to do 4K/60fps on this new box. And we built the box to deliver that goal. So we know the box will do what we want it to do.
I think people get confused and say our messaging is weird. Not every developer is going to use it that way. Not every developer is going to decide to take that 6TFLOPs and do 4K/60fps with it. They might decide for their game, their engine that they want to do something different and that’s fine. But our goal is to build a box that deliver true 4K games at the same level of fidelity that you see on your current Xbox One games. That is the box we are building. We know we can do it. We wouldn’t have went out and said it if we didn’t think we could do it. We have a lot of work ahead to do it but that is our goal.
I am not saying every game will be 4K/60fps but developers may not choose to do that.
Due for release in late 2017, there are still a lot of questions on what we should expect from Xbox Scorpio. It’ll be exciting to see what developers manage to do with the pumped up hardware when it releases.