Frankly, I am more concerned with the question: how much are we prepared to pay ? If the machine costs 499.- it still needs to offer some interesting enhanced or original game versions to convince me to trade in my Xbox One S. 4k is all good and stuff, but I dont think Gears 4 in 4K or Forza will convince anybody. I played those, and they are great, but not 499.- bucks great for 4k, if You catch my drift. Xbox needs a REAL showcase, a Breath of the Wild calibre showcase.

All that tells us is hints as to what we expect to pay vs Ps4 Pro. MS simply took an engineering approach to its performance and footprint goals.

Has no bearing on the box's actual performance as its a bespoke design meant to run Xbox/DX12  games to the metal...not poorly optimized,  driver overhead laden PC game code. 

Yes but we shouldn't act like optimization is magical... Optimization will certainly help the Scorpio do much more than it's PC counterpart but I doubt it will give so much power that it will be on par with the 1070 in most instances... Just as how the Ps4 Pro was not on par with the 1060 even though people were claiming the "optimization" will do just that and even more...

It's always a little hard to tell, as the super-duper-optimized games usually are exclusives, to you can't compare them with a PC version.

Horizon looks a lot better than most games available on PC (dialog animation and complete absence of dynamic water notwithstanding,) but a lot of that is art direction and careful polishing aside from the clever optimization.

Apples and oranges.

For one Scorpio has a dedicated hardware to offload CPU utilization....meaning it doesnt need a monster i7 to push GPU utilization.

Reality Check: PC = A bunch of parts slapped together on a motherboard running copper traces.

A SoC engineered PRIMARILY for rendering graphics at the silicon level has unmitigated benefits and efficiencies.

Consoles do more with less, and PC parts age faster because after 1-2 years they are no longer the focus of the driver teams.

Yet we see time and time again that it won't matter for most cases... Yes, scorpio has hardware that will push above it's weight (I didn't say otherwise) but there is hardly anything in it which suggests that it will deliver performance like a 1070.

Not sure what some of other PC comments have to do with anything though. Just sounds like you are taking shots if anything... And I am pretty sure the driver support is much longer than 1-2 years although I am not sure what does that have to do with anything... And it's also not like you need an i7 to take advantage of a 1070 (or most other GPUs) either.

Yes, a 1070...to make an argument of its performance- requires a no CPU bottleneck and proper driver support over the long haul. And in the end..its still a 4K/30 GPU at best. Anyone that has seen the rapid demise of the GTX780/780Ti as soon as the 970 came out has witnessed what happens in the PC space. For one year to another you go from balls to the wall the best, to forgotten and poorly optimized even if you are close or faster in the theoretical realm.

The way Scorpio has been engineered it will aim for that same perf target. Will it always deliver a solid 4K profile? No, then again neither does a 1070.

Well yea if you want to see a no cpu bottleneck but as the resolutions increase, the cpu doesn't become the limiting factor... You don't need say an i7 to get the full performance out of a 1070 at say 4k... But if you are talking about a pure measurement of performance instead of whether or not you need an i7 to take advantage, then I agree.

There is also more to hardware than to just achieve the resolution such as graphical detail settings. I am not talking about achieving 4k because I think the Scorpio will deliver 4k resolution in virtually every single game however I doubt it will be in the same settings as a 1070 thus making it weaker.

Also if we are talking about optimization, lets not forget that it is up to the developers on whether or not they want to optimize to take advantage of the hardware. Case and point: Ps4 Pro. We have seen games be all over the place when it comes to optimization... Some games have visual enhancements at 1080p while other's don't. Some games are checkerboarding from 1440p where as others such as nier are running at 1080p. And many more different configurations so it's not like optimization is the end all be all secret sauce. Where as we have seen a 1060 beat a ps4 pro in visual quality regardless of the resolution it's running in. Specially when you consider that there is little to gain in terms of money from doing additional work apart from just ensuring that the game runs at 4k from the publisher's side.

And yes, the 7xx series certainly performed oddly however I'd consider the 700 series the exception than the rule. Since Pascal has been out for nearly a year now and the 9xx series have not taken a hit like the 7xx did.

I agree with many of your points, but PS4 Pro has its apparent limitations and that's why developers have been at odds as to which way to offer refinements due to those bottlenecks. I'd argue to the contrary, its actually been impressive what they've achieved given those limitations in many cases.

Take into consideration that game developers have adapted to using PS4's fast memory bandwidth to hit that 1080p target...and now with PS4 PRO they have 2X the GPU and the SAME bandwidth. They are stuck passing the same asset quality and having to resort to checkerboarding to reconstruct a higher quality image.

MS has had a better engineering effort and it shows, they dug deeper and smarter for a hardware refresh. They are giving developers a 384 bit bus and 326 GB/S to handle all the 4K assets and bandwith extensive data...thats GPU bandwith even get in the best 1080 PC with GDDR5/X you can buy.

All the fast ram they need, more bandwidth they'd know what to do with, a FAST GPU clock for a console...they just targeted throughput better than in Sony's case and it will be developer friendly to have the overhead to do more.

Sorry for the late reply, I was out.

I will 110% agree that the Scorpio is a much better machine than a ps4 pro. Not in the sense that its more powerful (which it obviously is) but in the sense that it is a lot more well thoughtout than the ps4 pro.

But to go back to the point of the ps4 pro, while I understand the whole "they were able to do a lot with what they had to due to ps4's limitation," there is a point to be made that looking at how developers have treated 1080p experience is kind of lackluster. For most games, developers either seem to do the most basic "enhancements" or none at all. Even sony's own developers have removed some 1080p enhancements from uc4 and the last of us remastered with patches instead of optimizing them. And of course, at checkerboarding for the most part, its just the regular ps4's graphical settings bumped up. The point is, while it's cool what developers can do, it mostly results in the most basic enhancements and then calling it a day.

Another thing is that a desktop 470 which we are matching with the Ps4 pro can achieve PC max settings for Rise of Tomb Raider at 1440p. (Obviously not at 60fps but the pro is running at 30fps)

Now of course, the ps4 pro is also checkerboarding to 4k while the 470 isn't but also remember that Rise of Tomb raider also uses ps4's graphical settings and not the PC max graphics settings. Also the desktop 470 has less memory bandwidth and less vram and a ps4 pro. However, even with all that, at 1080p with its enhanced visuals mode, the ps4 pro couldn't match PC max. So I feel like if they did put in more effort, they could have maybe reached higher detail which goes back to my point of how leaving it to optimization is a double edged sword. And Rise of Tomb raider is actually one of the if not the most enhanced games for the ps4 pro.

Now going back to Scorpio, many of it's enhancements require the developers to be able to take advantage of it. In the tech analysis for example, he states how the way they have implemented the additional bandwidth is not traditional. He goes to state that:

"What makes things especially interesting though is that Microsoft didn’t just switch out DDR3 for GDDR5, but they’re using a wider memory bus as well; expanding it by 50% to 384-bits wide. Not only does this even further expand the console’s memory bandwidth – now to a total of 326GB/sec, or 4.8x the XB1’s DDR3 – but it means we have an odd mismatch between the ROP backends and the memory bus."

"What this means is that at some level, Microsoft is running an additional memory crossbar in the SoC, which would be very similar to what AMD did back in 2012 with the Radeon HD 7970. Because the console SoC needs to split its memory bandwidth between the CPU and the GPU, things aren’t as cut and dry here as they are with discrete GPUs. But, at a high level, what we saw from the 7970 is that the extra bandwidth + crossbar setup did not offer much of a benefit over a straight-connected, lower bandwidth configuration. Accordingly, AMD has never done it again in their dGPUs. So I think it will be very interesting to see if developers can consistently consume more than 218GB/sec or so of bandwidth using the GPU."

So what my understanding is that while there is additional bandwith avaliable, developers will be able to use it through a slightly more different method than they traditionally will which means they will most likely have to optimize specifically for it. And that's just one example.

It might sound like I am consistantly trying to be the downer when it comes to Scorpio's performance but all I am saying is to keep peoples expectations in check because history does repeat itself and relying on optimization for non base hardware consoles is something that might turn out not so great results as one would expect from console level optimization. And of course, even with optimization, I am skepitcal at best.