In one hell of an exclusive scoop, Eurogamer and Digital Foundry have been given a deep inside look at Microsoft’s upcoming Project Scorpio, answering an awful lot of questions now, as opposed to waiting until E3. Of course, there’s an awful lot still to find out about the console, such as its name, price, the games that will be the first to take advantage of it, but one thing is clear: Sony won’t be able to claim to have the most powerful games console for much longer.
The heart of the new console is being dubbed the Scorpio Engine, the combined CPU and GPU system on a chip. This has been greatly improved on both fronts. The CPU is still derived from the same “Jaguar” CPU cores as the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 is, but it’s been customised further to perform certain tasks better and clocked higher to 2.3Ghz, versus the Xbox One’s 1.75Ghz and PS4 Pro’s 2.1Ghz.
The GPU is a custom AMD design as well, and while it’s still not clear what GPU architecture it’s most closely related to, it will feature 40 compute units to the Xbox One’s 12 and PS4 Pro’s 36, and it’s clocked 250Mhz higher than its closest rivals at 1172Mhz. All told, the CPU is a good step up over the Xbox One, while the GPU is huge leap and easily 4.6 times as powerful. With that ratio, it should be more than enough to reach native 4K on a more consistent level than the PlayStation 4 Pro.
| Project Scorpio | PS4 Pro | Xbox One | |
| CPU | Eight custom x86 cores @ 2.3GHz | Eight Jaguar cores @ 2.1GHz | Eight Jaguar cores @ 1.75GHz |
| GPU | 40 Cus at 1172MHz | 36 Cus @ 911MHz | 12 Cus @ 853MHz |
| Memory | 12GB GDDR5 | 8GB GDDR5 | 8GB DDR3/32MB ESRAM |
| Memory Bandwidth | 326GB/s | 218GB/s | DDR3 @ 68GB/s, ESRAM @ 204GB/s |
| Hard Drive | 1TB 2.5” | 1TB 2.5” | 500GB 2.5” and up |
| Optical Drive | 4K UHD Blu-ray | Blu-ray | Blu-ray / 4K UHD |
Here’s Digital Foundry’s typically excellent analysis and explanation in video form:
Much like the recent addition to the PlayStation 4 Pro system software, Scorpio will be able to leverage its greater power to improve the way that older games run that don’t have dedicated support for the system, this relates to both Xbox One and Xbox 360 backward compatibility games. The equivalent to Boost Mode on PS4 Pro, those games will be more likely to be able to hold and maintain their target frame rate, dynamic resolution scaling will kick in less frequently and so on. Going beyond that, the extra RAM capacity can be used to pre-fetch data from the HDD and use the beefier CPU to process it, leading to speedier loading times, and Microsoft are pulling a neat trick by overriding the game’s texture filtering calls and replacing bilinear and trilinear filtering with 16x anisotropic filtering. Put simply, older games will run better and they’ll look better.
And if you love to capture and share gameplay footage, one major benefit of the new GPU is that it will be able to capture at 4K and 60 frames per second, making use of the latest HEVC codec to keep data sizes in check. The PS4 Pro only upped this to 1080p capture.
Starman
Very nice. I’m liking this new approach of keeping a generation going with upgrades than abandoning it all and starting again.
kjkg
I’m not the most tech savvy guy but some of those numbers are pretty impressive. I’ll openly admit that I am a bit of a playstation fanboy (not a hater, just always preferred the Sony consoles) but I am very jealous of this machine.
History says I won’t buy it but I definitely will be looking on in envy.
MrYd
If things end up the way it looks like they’ll probably end up, you won’t have to be jealous for long. Give it a year or 2 and Sony will have the next PS4/PS5, which is inevitably going to be even more powerful.
Then another year or 2 before MS overtake that.
And the good thing about smaller, more frequent updates is you don’t have to buy every one. And if Sony/MS are sensible, you’re not supposed to buy every one. If games for 1 version of the console are required to work on the previous one, you’re ok. They might look a bit better on the newer one though. And games for the next one (PS5 or whatever) don’t have to work on the PS4, only the Pro.
It might slow down any evolution in the games themselves, same way some early PS4 games might have been held back a bit by also having PS3 versions. But then again, you’re not looking at having to completely rebuild the game for completely different hardware, you’re just throwing more power at it.
The only problem I can see is the actual CPU isn’t improving as fast as the rest of the hardware. The faster GPU and memory might make the Scorpio twice the power of the PS4Pro, but that CPU? Little bit faster clock speed plus whatever other improvements there are. What happens in cases where it’s the CPU holding back the game? (AC Unity seemed to be one game where that might have been the case. All those crowds of people upset the CPU while the GPU wasn’t too bothered. Until someone’s face fell off)
But yeah, it’s impressive, and hopefully (with the PS4Pro) the start of a more frequent and easier upgrade path. I’d even be interested myself if (a) I don’t need to start another bloody backlog, (b) I had the money, and (c) there were any interesting exclusives at all.
stonyk
Probably already mentioned but couple of things come to mind. Firstly Loving the upgrade without needing to start from scratch. Makes backward compatability obsolete.
Secondly, when the Scorpio comes out I may upgrade to a massively cheaper ps4 pro. I’m guessing Scorpio will release for £350-£400 while pro will be £250 with game.
Of course if ms decide to bring out some decent exclusives I could cracking and get a Scorpio like I cracked with the switch…