Leaked whitepaper report on Project Scorpio hints at what the console is meant to be

For a while we’ve known that Microsoft was working on a new super-console they announced at E3 2016, dubbing the effort Project Scorpio. Since the initial teaser video, showing renders of internal and board components, we have heard almost nothing regarding what the price point will be, when specifically in ‘Holiday 2017′ it’ll launch, and most importantly, what’s inside and powering the show. A report from Eurogamer today finally sheds some light on what’s coming inside Project Scorpio, and it’s less surprising than you’d hope.
According to Eurogamer.net’s Richard Leadbetter, he received an anonymously-sent whitepaper document from around the time Project Scorpio was made public at E3 last summer. The document, intended to give developers an idea of what the console would eventually be without actually giving away any details or specifics, provides some actual glimpses of what’s to come in Project Scorpio’s hardware. According to Leadbetter, the whitepaper discussed ESRAM, an ultra-fast, ultra-high-bandwidth memory that allows the Xbox One and One S’s APU to utilize the slower, by comparison to modern GDDR5 memory, DDR3 system memory effectively. In the whitepaper, Microsoft wrote “ESRAM remains essential to achieving high performance on both Xbox One and Xbox One S”, followed later by “However, Project Scorpio and PC are not provided with ESRAM.” This tells us two very important things about Scorpio’s hardware changes.
First, the lack of ESRAM on Project Scorpio boards likens the console more to the PC, using dedicated memory for graphics processing. And second, from this likeness to the PC, as well as a later reference to the processor in Project Scorpio being able to access the high-bandwidth system memory and having four times as much Level 2 cache memory to do so. Leadbetter writes that the GPU is “at least as modern as AMD’s Polaris line” when considering the performance we are aware of so far.
The biggest aspects of the document is by far how developers are both barred from making Scorpio-only products and how Scorpio’s system resources can be utilized in-game. We’ve heard, and hoped given Sony had the same stipulation when launching the PlayStation 4 Pro, that the higher-powered console would not receive exclusives that would not be able to run on previous consoles. Again, Microsoft confirms that developers, even if they aim primarily at Scorpio hardware, must make the game compatible with the Xbox One S as well as the original Xbox One consoles.
With Project Scorpio being heralded as a true 4K gaming console, resolution has been a high concern, especially since the PlayStation 4 Pro is only able to upscale the internal resolution to 4K displays. With the whitepaper document, the worry still exists, but we get a clearer idea of what developers can do regarding visuals. Leadbetter notes that the document says that “developers may not with to spend all of the additional GPU resource of Project Scorpio on resolution, and this is not mandated’, meaning that 4K is an option, not a standard, with Project Scorpio. What’s especially concerning is that the document mentions how, rather than focus on output resolution, developers may choose to devote the power of Project Scorpio to produce “higher fidelity shadows, reflections, texture filtering, and lower draw distances”, setting the ‘true 4K console’ title further from what even Microsoft believes developers will make of Project Scorpio.
While we still know very little of Project Scorpio’s exact spec sheet, Leadbetter’s report on the document gives us a fuller list of things to anticipate. Thus far, we know Project Scorpio will be based on an eight-core processor with more L2 cache memory, a 320GB/s memory bandwidth, and a board render that, according to Leadbetter, strongly hints at 12 gigabytes of GDDR5 memory. As Project Scorpio develops further, and undoubtedly gets leaked more as we close in on its late-2017 launch, stay tuned to Rectify Gaming for the latest on what we know and can expect from Microsoft’s most powerful console ever.
Source: Eurogamer