Microsoft Detail Their Supercharged Xbox Project Scorpio Dev Kit

Once a games console has been announced, all of its technical details bared to the world, the hushed talk about dev kits tends to die down. They’re essentially the same console hardware are is released to the public, but with different software that allows for development code to be run and with many more options and diagnostic tools available to developers. The dev kit for Project Scorpio is a little different, though, and it another example of how Microsoft are devoting themselves to winning back both developers and gamers.

For one thing, it’s actually even more powerful than the Scorpio itself. The CPU is clocked the same, at 2.3Ghz, but there’s 44 Compute Units in the GPU compared to 40 CUs in the consumer Scorpio, the RAM is doubled to 24GB, and it features a 1TB SSD as opposed to a spinning HDD.

It stems from a desire to get the best out of lower powered hardware, with Microsoft’s Kevin Gammill saying to Gamasutra that, “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. 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.”

To that end, the Scorpio dev kit can run in four distinct modes: full power, retail Scorpio, Xbox One S and Xbox One. If necessary, it can step down to match the clock speeds and number of enabled cores of the original Xbox One, as a quick and easy way for developers to check that unit. However, with changes to the CPU and GPU design and a move away from the twinned ESRAM and DDR3 RAM set up, it’s not an exact match.

Beyond that, there’s also an uncommonly customised fit and finish to these units. Once the final retail form of a console has been decided, that’s usually the form that dev kits adopt, so a dev kit PS4 just looks like a PS4, Switch looks like a Switch and so on. Not so with Scorpio dev kit, which has been designed with an OLED display on the front to show useful data like frames per second, CPU load and so on at a glance, there’s programmable buttons on the front, and an extra network interface for collecting debug information while playing multiplayer.

Last but not least, having found that developers were stacking consoles on top of each other to save space – replete with ungainly LEGO-based spacing solutions – Microsoft changed the cooling to vent hot air out the back and sides of the console as opposed to the top, as on the retail Xbox One and One S.

While we shouldn’t read too much into the dev kit Scorpio’s design, it does have a distinct Xbox One S feel to it, with a white upper shell and a black base. It might indicate that Microsoft are keeping a common design language from One S through to the Scorpio, just as Sony’s redesigned PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 4 Pro have a related design.

Source: Gamasutra