Xbox Scorpio Specs Leaked

Specifications for Microsoft’s forthcoming 4K Xbox One revision, codenamed Scorpio, have leaked, confirming some rumours about the hardware and teasing new details as yet unknown. The leak, in the form of a white paper on the console, comes courtesy of Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry.

The first tidbit revealed by the paper is that the Scorpio will ditch ESRAM, which current iterations of the Xbox One relies on.

“ESRAM remains essential to achieving high performance on both Xbox One and Xbox One S,” the whitepaper reveals. “However, Project Scorpio and PC are not provided with ESRAM. Because developers are not allowed to ship a Project Scorpio-only SKU, optimising for ESRAM remains critical to performance on Microsoft platforms.”

The leak also reveals that the console’s GPU architecture will be “as modern” as AMD Polaris, while confirming the oft-mentioned 6TFLOP capabilities.

“There are other clues as to Scorpio’s final hardware set-up within the whitepaper,” Digital Foundry’s Richard Leadbetter explains. “The six teraflop GPU is once again confirmed, with the GPU’s compute power rated at around 4.5 times the capabilities of Xbox One. Four times more L2 cache is also confirmed – a new detail that does not tell us that much, except that that the GPU architecture in Scorpio is at least as modern as AMD’s Polaris line. Based on our discussions with Mark Cerny on PS4 Pro, we can reasonably assume that Microsoft can customise its GPU core just as Sony did, with access to Radeon roadmap features up to – and perhaps beyond – AMD’s upcoming Vega architecture. Microsoft gives away little here, other than to confirm that delta colour compression (DCC) is a part of the Scorpio GPU feature set, just as it is in PS4 Pro.”

The white paper focuses mainly on how developers can utilised the Scorpio’s revised hardware, its speculation upon which may point to the power of the console’s CPU, seemingly dispelling rumours that it will contain an AMD Zen processor.

“We acknowledge that developers may not wish to spend all of the additional GPU resource of Project Scorpio on resolution, and this is not mandated,” the paper reads. “To make the best games possible, developers will inevitably spend GPU resource on other quality improvements such as higher fidelity shadows, reflections, texture filtering and lower draw distances. Another option developers might consider is frame-rate upscaling – running graphics at 60Hz but the CPU at 30Hz and interpolating animation.”

The Xbox One Scorpio is expected for release during the Holiday period of 2017.