Digital Foundry – Xbox Scorpio Spec Analysis
The team at Digital Foundry shared some thoughts on yesterday’s Xbox Scorpio official announcement and some key comments are worth pointing out. Between explaining some of the specs and being excited about the new hardware, it is clear that Xbox is pushing forward to be the most powerful platform again.
Source: Digital Foundry
| PS4 | PS4K Neo | Xbox One | Project Scorpio | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | Eight Jaguar cores clocked at 1.6GHz | Eight Jaguar cores clocked at 2.1GHz | Eight Jaguar cores clocked at 1.75GHz | Eight cores, speculation: up-clocked Jaguar or equivalent |
| GPU | 18 Radeon GCN compute units at 800MHz | 36 improved GCN compute units at 911MHz | 12 GCN compute units at 853MHz | Speculation: 56/60 GCN compute units at 800-850MHz |
| Memory | 8GB GDDR5 at 176GB/s | 8GB GDDR5 at 218GB/s | 8GB DDR3 at 68GB/s and 32MB ESRAM at max 218GB/s | Over 320GB/s bandwidth – speculation: 12GB of GDDR5 |
“Removing barriers… Innovation and the latest technology… delivering the world’s most powerful console is something we absolutely want to do… the most powerful graphics processor that’s been put into a game console… the highest res… the best frame-rate… no compromises… we can render at 60Hz… we can render fully uncompressed quality pixels… the best quality pixels… true 4K gaming…”
The pitch presented at the E3 press conference for Project Scorpio is plain and simple. While some of the claims sound a little bizarre or straight-out laughable (uncompressed pixels?), Microsoft aims to regain control of the technological high ground with its own mid-generation console refresh. What we’re looking at here is an ambitious leap-frogging of the PlayStation 4K Neo in technological terms, with Microsoft utilising the top-tier parts available from hardware partner AMD – technology we’ve yet to see fully revealed in the PC space.
Actual performance figures and hard specs are thin on the ground, but there’s enough information here for us to put together a picture on what Scorpio offers and whether it can indeed deliver on the claims made for it.