Microsoft Attempts to Shake Up the Console War

Microsoft has released details about their ‘Project Scorpio’ which hopes to level the playing field with Sony in the 4k gaming stakes.

With 4k gaming (and televisions) having come to the forefront in the last couple years, Sony was the first console to address this market when they released the PS4 Pro last year, the first true 4k gaming console, and since this time Sony has been dominating the console sales. While it is fairly established that Sony won the ‘console war’ with Microsoft a little over three years ago, Sony once again seemingly found a niche which Microsoft have only now decided to attempt to squeeze in.

Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox at Microsoft has said: “If you said to me, ‘could you or another console manufacturer design a $2,000 console that ran, like, two Titan Xs SLI-d together?’ Then yeah, we could do it. But the console price points aren’t there. If you’re willing to spend a couple of grand building up an i7-based machine with umpteen terabytes of RAM, you can go do that on a PC. But I actually feel with Scorpio we’ve been able to hit a really nice price/performance ratio. When we talk about the price, I think people will see that. It is a premium product, there’s no doubt, but I think relative to the PC that you could go buy at this spec, you’re gonna feel really good.”

What should be made clear is that Project Scorpio is not, strictly speaking, a new console, however, it will contain a significant upgrade on the current specifications of the Xbox-One and indeed surpassing the PS4-pro quite significantly.

Project Scorpio does already have its critics as we recently reported discontent from the developers of Forza.

Project Scorpio is set to feature;

• Eight Custom x86 cores clocked to 2.3ghz.
• A 1172mhz graphics card.
• 12gb of system memory.

The above is intended to allow 4K gaming at a solid 60 fps with full support for HDR colour.

With Sony expected to release details for their next console soon, Microsoft will be anxious to see that this launch is a lot more successful than their doomed Xbox One marketing campaign.

Project Scorpio is scheduled for release later this year and will look to hope to squeeze in as the Christmas console, offering what will potentially be some of the best looking visuals outside of the PC.