The Xbox Scorpio Hasn’t Failed to Impress
Last week, Microsoft delivered its comprehensive list of specs to Digital Foundry. From there, the company showcased Turn 10’s own Forza Tech demo on the new Xbox hardware. Apparently, the results were astonishing when Turn 10 transferred Forza 6 Apex’s Ultra settings from PC to the Scorpio. Even with substantial GPU power delegated to graphics, there was power to spare.
The results of the tech demo basically implied that Scorpio can relieve some of the work when it comes to polishing video games. Software Architect of Turn 10, Chris Tector, said this to Eurogamer:
“The crazy story here is that we’ve gone over our PC ultra settings and for everything that’s GPU-related, we’ve been able to max it – and that’s what we’re running at, 88 per cent.
“This is rendering the player LOD for every car, so you won’t see a single LOD pop. [It’s the] top-level model you’d see in race, one below what you see in Autovista, the model you usually only see for the player. And then we balance out LODs across the scene. It’s a disgusting abuse of GPU power is what it is, right?
“It’s horrible but we can do it and we still have the power left over. The awesome part about the whole story [is] that we can spend all this time heading into the future. Instead of saying how are we going to wrestle to get the performance on this, we’re actually saying we can make this quality trade-off or this quality trade-off and spend that time iterating heading towards much better image quality – so instead of stressing about getting to a final resolution for titles or a final frame-rate, we can really drive it all into quality.”
All from the architect’s mouth. According to Tector, Xbox Scorpio paves the way for easier game development. Meanwhile, Xbox affirms that developers will see a, more or less, uniform relief that will allow more production time for performance. “Chris’s experience is not atypical of what we’ve seen from partners we’ve had in,” said Kevin Gammill, Group Program Manager at Xbox, “varying, different degrees of results but all positive. It’s been great.”
We await more Scorpio impressions from developers, now that its specs are published and disseminated. If the new console’s power is as convenient as it sounds, perhaps we’ll see more first-party titles from Xbox. Time will tell. Simply check back for all the major info as it comes.