Project Scorpio's Dev kit has been shown off

Last week Microsoft let Digital Foundry have the chance to reveal the specs of Project Scorpio and this week they let Gamasutra reveal the dev kit for the upcoming powerful console.Project Scorpio also looks to be a little smaller than the Xbox One Slim and do not expect the consumer product to look anything like this version.

“It was pretty close after that that we started on what our hardware roadmap was gonna be,” Spencer told Gamasutra during a recent visit to Microsoft. “The ideas behind [the Xbox One] S were in flight slightly, because we knew we would do something in terms of a hardware refresh. But in terms of something more powerful, that kind of came in at that time.”

When it comes to a powerful console like Scorpio, console game devs must now think like PC game devs. The limits and comforts of having a single device to target are gone; in their place, developers who make games for Xbox must now think like PC game devs, building their games to scale across at least two significantly different hardware configurations.

“You can just write to the original set of [Xbox One] requirements that we have today, and then we’ll do the work to make sure that it actually runs better. But [developers] don’t have to do any custom work for Scorpio,” Choudhry told Gamasutra. “We’re just inviting people to come in and take advantage of it. In terms of requirements if they do decide to take advantage of it, we want that content to run, at minimum the same as but ideally better than it does on the original Xbox One.“

The console currently known as Scorpio will sport a new custom eight-core CPU clocked at 2.3 Ghz. Kevin Gammill, Microsoft’s group program manager for Xbox Core Platform, claims that’s a 31 percent improvement over the Xbox One S, and that the CPU itself works more efficiently with the console’s GPU.

“The other thing we did is improve our GPU to CPU coherent bandwidth. So the bandwidth between the CPU and the GPU is drastically improved as well,” Gammill said. “The net result of all that is that not only does the CPU clock faster than it does in Xbox One, it’s actually more efficient than the one in both Xbox One and Xbox One S. We had more time to tune it. You learn a lot when you put something out there, you can iterate on it, and this is the result of our learnings.”

 
At a high level, it’s much easier for a game developer to come in higher and tune down, than come in lower and tune up. Or nail it. That just rarely happens,” said Gammill, by way of explaining why the Scorpio dev kit is a bit beefier than its retail counterpart. “Our overarching design principle was to make it easy for devs to hit our goals: 4K, 4K textures, rocksteady framerates, HDR, wide color gamut, and spatial audio.”

Expect more Project Scorpio news within this next week and moving forward closer to E3.
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