Last year there were countless rumors of a new more powerful Xbox One and during E3 2016 Microsoft confirmed that we would, in fact, be getting a more powerful Xbox One, codenamed Project Scorpio. This new powerful Xbox console was confirmed feature eight cores, six teraflops, 320GB/s memory bandwidth, 4K/VR gaming, backward compatibility, and will be available this holiday season.
Since the console was confirmed by Microsoft, we haven't heard much else besides the "most powerful console ever" bit. Within the last week, a number of rumors surfaced stating the Digital Foundry would be revealing the hardware breakdown of Project Scorpio, but simply the hardware. No price. No pictures. No final name.
The day has come and Digital Foundry has kept their promise. Without further ado, let's dive into Project Scorpio.
| Project Scorpio | Xbox One | PS4 Pro | |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | Eight custom x86 cores clocked at 2.3GHz | Eight custom Jaguar cores clocked at 1.75GHz | Eight Jaguar cores clocked at 2.1GHz |
| GPU | 40 customised compute units at 1172MHz | 12 GCN compute units at 853MHz (Xbox One S: 914MHz) | 36 improved GCN compute units at 911MHz |
| Memory | 12GB GDDR5 | 8GB DDR3/32MB ESRAM | 8GB GDDR5 |
| Memory Bandwidth | 326GB/s | DDR3: 68GB/s, ESRAM at max 204GB/s (Xbox One S: 219GB/s) | 218GB/s |
| Hard Drive | 1TB 2.5-inch | 500GB/1TB/2TB 2.5-inch | 1TB 2.5-inch |
| Optical Drive | 4K UHD Blu-ray | Blu-ray (Xbox One S: 4K UHD) | Blu-ray |
Digital Foundry's Richard Leadbetter (and his team) was invited to Microsoft's Redmond campus to check out Project Scorpio's hardware and it was definitely an experience. Leadbetter detailed that Digital Foundry saw a Forza Motorsport demo running on the machine "at native 4K and Xbox One equivalent settings, and it hit 60 frames per second with a substantial performance overhead – suggesting Scorpio will hit its native 4K target across a range of content, with power to spare to spend on other visual improvements."
Project Scorpio features the new 'Scorpio Engine,' the new SoC (system on chip), which was developed with AMD (like the Xbox One's). The Scorpio Engine has been ramped up to 1172MHz which definitely overtakes the Xbox One's 853MHz, and the PS4 Pro's 911MHz as well.
As far as the GPU goes, Microsoft has indeed delivered their promised six teraflops, which includes a bump up on memory. The Xbox One and PS4 Pro feature around 8GB of memory, but Scorpio takes it to 12GB, with 8GB going to developers, 4GB for the system to run (in native 4K too). The GPU is 4.6 times more powerful than the Xbox One's.
The new x86 cores in Scorpio are 31% faster than the Xbox One's, which pretty much bumps up every other feature of Project Scorpio.
All of this extra power brings us back to the Forza Motorsport demo. The demo used the maximum amount of cars, ran with full AI and physics simulations, making it an incredible stress test for the console and it still had power to spare after hitting a locked 60FPS and native 4K resolution.
Overall it is more powerful than the PS4 Pro.
It's being estimated that it will release at the same price as the original Xbox One, $499. However that is simply an estimate and not confirmed by Microsoft.
TL;DR: Yeah, it's strong.
