ForzaTech on Project Scorpio: what we know

After Digital Foundry’s Richard Leadbetter revealed the full list of Project Scorpio specifications earlier this week, which you can check out here, he mentioned he had much more coming in the way of Project Scorpio information.  Today, he shared the first aspect: FrozaTech running on Project Scorpio.
As Xbox fans will know by now, Turn 10 Studios was originally created by the folks at Microsoft to bring console-showcasing visual technology to the Xbox device family, and they’ve done this through six Motorsport launches and three Horizon entries.  Turn 10 is an extremely close first-party developer that aims to take full advantage of the latest console’s power, and that looks to continue with Project Scorpio.  When Leadbetter visited Redmond, he specifically asked for a working demo, rather than just talks and explanations.  The Turn 10 team had one already prepared, and it utilized the ForzaTech engine from just after Forza Motorsport 6 launched in 2015.  Two days after the team decided to bring ForzaTech to Project Scorpio, they had accomplished native functionality with (largely) only codebase upgrades from the older XDK.
According to Leadbetter, that demo he saw of ForzaTech on Project Scorpio hardware was months old by the time of his visit, and it hadn’t had any Scorpio-specific improvements except for the addition of 4K assets for the vehicles.  This alone makes a great case for Xbox scalability, as simple upgrades allowed a flagship engine to easily be adapted to pre-release hardware with much more horsepower.  However, Leadbetter later goes into some specifics he took note of during the demonstration.
In the video where he talks about highlights of the demonstration and surrounding experience, Leadbetter notes that he watched framerates stay locked at 60 and the 4K resolution not waver or scale down once.  Turn 10 apparently explained that the settings they were using to test ForzaTech on Project Scorpio hardware were roughly similar to the Ultra preset in Forza Motorsport 6 Apex for PC, which requires an NVIDIA GTX 1070 to run as smoothly.  During the demo, Leadbetter noticed that GPU and VRAM utilization would usually sit at the 65-ish percent mark he showed in the original screenshot, but that it would also make moves up into the 80 and 90 percent range, with a spike or two to 100.  An interesting aspect Leadbetter points out is that the 60 percent utilization on Project Scorpio would directly equate to between 80 and 90 percent on an Xbox One powering the same experience at 1080p.  The fact that this means Project Scorpio’s extra memory and power can go towards other in-game aspects is great news for expectant gamers.
Leadbetter closes, remarking that while the Forza demonstration was a good showcase, Turn 10 has first-party benefits and a longer period of access to the developing hardware, but that other developers are “seeing exceptionally fast ‘getting up and running’ times” with the now-complete development kits.  Project Scorpio has the raw processing power to allow games to run exceedingly well, but that relies heavily on a developer’s focus and attention to the console in specific, making third-party focus from teams like EA and Activision Blizzard important near-essential to have Project Scorpio succeed over not only older Xbox One consoles, but also Sony’s latest PlayStation 4 and 4 Pro.
As Leadbetter mentioned in the initial reveal piece, he’s got multiple stories upstream regarding Project Scorpio, so we’ll likely hear from him again soon.  For those updates and the latest on Project Scorpio, be sure to stay tuned to Rectify Gaming.
Source: Digital Foundry