Phil Spencer Joins Developers in Being Staggered by Scorpio’s Power
Here we are, a couple months away from E3 2017 and the big reveal. Nevertheless, We’re learning more about Xbox Scorpio as we go. Yesterday, we learned about the console’s ability to enhance Forza 6 with PC settings. Today, Gamasutra revealed their exclusive coverage of the devkit, providing everyone with a lengthy Q&A with the man himself – Phil Spencer.
Originally, according to Spencer, Xbox wanted their product to meet the anticipation of 4K TVs. Therefore, the goal behind Scorpio was getting a balanced console that could deliver better visuals without sacrificing performance. For that, it needed power. In chasing that goal, it appears the division created a system that could provide the best performance boost on the market:
“I think what they’re going to see in Scorpio is the best version of the game that they’ve seen on console,” said Spencer.
“And that’s a little bit of ego speaking, but I’ll say, as we designed the console we picked a certain GPU, we picked a certain CPU frequency we wanted to hit, an amount of RAM we wanted, an amount of memory bandwidth we wanted, and I kind of talked about it more as a balanced system.
Spencer has paid particular attention to the speed of Scorpio’s porting. The process has been a lot faster than usual and, apparently, third-party developers, have already gotten their hands on it.
“It’s easier to stand on stage with a 6 teraflop t-shirt, and people kind of focus on one thing, but the platform is obviously much more complex than a single number. I think it’s fair to say we’ve been, um, surprised by the performance gains that Scorpio is giving us. Beyond our expectation when we designed the hardware. The engines that we’ve been bringing through and porting over, one, they’ve ported over fairly quickly, as third-parties have been coming in. And our own first-parties. The porting has been fast.
“And this comes from, so many of these games have PC equivalents that if you say hey, can you set a 4K render target for your engine, you can often just say like sure, I just change this .ini setting right here. Boom! The engine knows how to go do this.”
Once E3 comes around, we’ll know everything we need to know about Xbox’s passion project, even though we already know quite a bit. Xbox Scorpio’s specs include: an eight-core CPU clocked at 2.3Ghz, 40 Compute Units clocked at 1172Mhz for 6 teraflops of computing power, 12GB of DDR5 RAM, a memory bandwidth of 326 GB/s, a 4K UHD Bluray drive, 4K@60 Hz Game DVR recording via HEVC and support for FreeSync 2 variable refresh rate displays.
Check back for more news from Microsoft and gaming at large. And let us know your thoughts on Scorpio beating Phil Spencer’s own expectations. Are you excited for the new powerhouse console? Comment down below.