Eight CPU cores, over 320GB/s of memory bandwidth, six teraflops of GPU power - how did they do that?
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.
GPU: Much faster than PlayStation Neo
First up, let's discuss the GPU - the area of the spec that Microsoft is clearly most proud of. The rumoured six TFLOPs of processing power is confirmed, out-stripping the 4.2TF found in PlayStation Neo by quite some margin. It's around 40 per cent faster, calling to mind the advantage PS4 had over Xbox One.
Memory: 12GB of GDDR5?
Microsoft also dropped some hard figures in terms of memory bandwidth too, telling us that Scorpio has over 320GB/s of throughput. This gives us a couple of useful data points. Firstly, it's almost certainly the case that the ESRAM experiment on Xbox One is now a thing of the past - Microsoft will be following the approach pioneered by Sony in using a single, unified pool of memory based on PC graphics RAM technology. Which technology that is remains to be seen - will it be GDDR5 or the faster G5X found in Nvidia's GTX 1080?
CPU: Eight cores, but what are they?
Microsoft didn't spend much time talking about the CPU technology found in Scorpio and if we were to be cynical about it, we'd suggest that it's because it's not going to show that much improvement over Xbox One. Just one specification was revealed - that Scorpio would have eight CPU cores, which brings it into line with the existing Xbox One, PS4 and indeed PS4K Neo.
Can Project Scorpio deliver the VR and 4K promises?
Based on existing AMD Radeon technology, the bottom line is that 6TF of GPU power isn't enough to power a convincing 4K experience. AMD's R9 390X offers around 5.9TF and struggles to push 4K resolution at anything like 30fps on modern PC titles. Now, we can assume that the move to the next-gen GCN architecture will give us some efficiency improvements, but it's hard to believe that this is enough to turn a 390X-level GPU into a top-tier Radeon R9 Fury X equivalent (8.4TF).
But it has to be said that we have seen developers start to extract more from Xbox One and PS4 than we see on equivalent PC parts - something borne out from the E3 demos of Gears of War 4 and Forza Horizon 3, which are - remarkably - running on hardware equivalent to AMD's £80 R7 360 graphics card. So maybe - maybe we will indeed see 4K native titles.
Where does this leave PlayStation 4K Neo?
It's a remarkable turnabout. A good portion of PlayStation 4's success has been down to its spec advantage over Xbox One, combined with a focus on the hardcore player. Sony's technological advantage will be gone with the next wave of hardware - we already know that it cannot support true 4K resolution on cutting-edge games, because we've seen the internal documents that outline Sony's upscaling strategies for 4K display support (more on that soon). It's also unfeasible for Sony to produce a radically revised Neo - the silicon has been designed, developer kits have gone out. Matching Scorpio would require scrapping Neo's existing processor completely.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-xbox-one-project-scorpio-spec-analysis
