Leak: Some of Xbox’s Project Scorpio specs leak; Resolution upscaling, GPU, and more

Xbox head Phil Spencer recently detailed how Project Scorpio was developing, saying that the upcoming iteration of the Xbox One looked "right" and the games played "great" on it.

It appears as though new information detailing Scorpio has landed in the hands of DigitalFoundry from an 'anonymous tipster.' It's safe to say that all of the information from this source should be taken with a grain of salt.

The source sent Digital Foundry a leaked Microsoft whitepaper from July 2016 titled 'Reaching 4K and CPU Scaling Across Multiple Xbox Devices.' The paper is available on Microsoft's developer portal, so it was easy to confirm to be the "real deal" according to Digital Foundry.

The biggest reveal from the whitepaper is that Scorpio may not be a 'true 4K console' as it was said to be at E3 2016. Instead, it may rely on upscaling resolution – as the PS4 Pro does. However, the document does specify that at least one 1080p game has transitioned to native 4K (probably Forza Horizon 3).

The Xbox One's ESRAM is gone in Project Scorpio, a feature that helped mitigate for the lower speed DDR3 System RAM. – which the Xbox One is based on. Despite the lack of ESRAM, Microsoft detailed that developers should develop with it in mind regardless:

"Because developers are not allowed to ship a Project Scorpio only SKU optimizing for ESRAM remains critical to performance on Microsoft platforms."

This means that developers creating games to run on Project Scorpio should be making their games available on Xbox One and lower-end PCs – which is something that was confirmed previously.

The whitepaper goes on to give hints on Project Scorpios hardware and confirms the six teraflops GPU and 4x L2 Cache (which doesn't say much). In addition to that, Delta Color Compression (DCC) will be featured on Project Scorpio, a feature that is also found in the PlayStation 4 Pro.

Microsoft went on to talk about upscaling framerate by "running graphics at 60Hz, but the CPU at 30Hz and interpolating animation." Which suggests that the Jaguar Core from the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 will be featured in Project Scorpio – not a newer core – but will be running more efficiently.

Project Scorpio claims 4x GPU power over the Xbox One, which is a bit low – considering some games would require an over 9x increase to hit 4K resolution. To combat resolution issues, it appears as though Microsoft is doing what Sony did with the PlayStation 4 Pro – Checkerboarding. Microsoft even refers to the same Rainbow Six Siege presentation that Sony used to show off the PS4 Pro's rendering.

Microsoft revealed Project Scorpio during E3 2016 as a more powerful iteration of the Xbox One. According to the reveal,  this new powerful Xbox console will feature eight cores, six teraflops, 320GB/s memory bandwidth, 4K/VR gaming, backward compatibility, and will be available in 2017.

While all of this is interesting, we need Microsoft to give us the details.