One-Man Race to Get Forza on Scorpio
The race is on for game developers to start their engines and get them ported over to the new Scorpio system, but Turn 10 has found it incredibly easy to port their ForzaTech and finished the race before many began – and it only took little old Microsoft engineer Matt Lee two days to get Forza running in 4K at 60 fps.
The name of the game is to get all Xbox One titles onto the new Scorpio system, which boasts a whole new system architecture, making backwards compatibility more difficult. With all that power, games could run too fast, like a DOS game on the fastest modern computer. But Turn 10 just took Matt Lee, locked him in a room with a little cardboard box and said “here you go.”
Chris Tector, Forza’s software architect, recounts the story:
“So Matt Lee, from the Direct3D team on Xbox, he shows up with a cardboard box full of parts. It’s like, a loose motherboard, the debugging adapters, the drives. And he sets it up on the desk. And it’s just like, there’s no proper cooling on it, so we just have a fan sitting there. And it’s blowing across it, and it vibrates, and the fan starts moving and the whole thing shuts down because the memory overheats and…it was comedy. So we taped the fan to the desk and we kept going and within 2 days, we were already running at 4K [resolution] 60 [frames per second].”
Turn 10 prepared for the long haul with such a beginning:
“We had set up this whole locked room. You know, secret hardware, gotta keep him sequestered while he’s working on it for the weeks and weeks it’ll take. And after two days he [Matt Lee] was like, ‘Well I’m gonna go, you guys can play around with it for a bit. I’ll come back in a day.’ And this was like this huge sigh of relief for us.”
Quite a development for Scorpio! If other developers find similar success, it could be a huge boom for the Scorpio hype.