Via Eurogamer heeft Microsoft behoorlijk veel informatie rondom de Xbox Scorpio vrijgegeven. Op verzoek van Microsoft mochten de mannen van Digital Foundry de specs bekijken van dat wat de meest krachtige console tot op heden moet zijn. De ontwikkeling van het nieuwe apparaat ligt voor op schema. We zijn zo’n zes maanden verwijderd van de release, al wordt een exacte datum niet gegeven.
Volgens Digital Foundry / Eurogamer draait het niet alleen om de specificaties, maar vooral wat Microsoft met de nieuwe console van plan is. Forza Motorsport werd getoond op de console in 4K met zestig frames per seconde, zonder ergens in te kakken. Wel geeft Microsoft aan dat hoewel 4K het doel is, mensen met een 1080p scherm zich geen zorgen hoeven te maken. Games die in 900p of 1080p gemaakt zijn voor de Xbox One, worden ook weergegeven in native 4K. Games die in 4K gemaakt zijn worden gedownlscaled naar 1080p voor de normale tv’s. Kevin Gammill, Group Program Director van het Xbox Core platform:
To me,[4K means a very specific set of things. It’s a lot more than delivering than those eight-million-plus pixels to the screen while playing games. It’s about delivering those pixels with 4K assets, so they look great. It’s about delivering those pixels with HDR and wide colour gamut fidelity. It’s about delivering those pixels with no loss of frame-rate compared to the 1080p version of that title – that’s super-important to us. Spatial audio adds to the immersive experience as well: to truly land that gameplay experience, it’s not just about what you see, but what you hear.
As we landed on 4K, Andrew Goossen and team did a pretty deep analysis. We have this developer tool called PIX [Performance Inspector for Xbox]. It lets us do some GPU trace capture. He and his team did a really deep analysis across a breadth of titles with the goal that any 900p or better title would be able to easily run at frame-rate at 4K on Scorpio. That was our big stake in the ground, and so with that we began our work speccing out what the Scorpio Engine is. It’s not a process of calling up AMD and saying I’ll take this part, this part and this part. A lot of really specific custom work went into this.
Andrew Goossen:
What we did was to take PIX captures from all of our top developers… By hand we went through them and then extrapolated what the work involved would be for that game to support a 4K render resolution. Now we had a model for all of our top-selling Xbox One games where we could tweak the configuration for the number of CUs, the clock, the memory bandwidth, the number of render back-ends, the number of shader engines, the cache size. We could tweak our design and figure out what was the most optimal configuration. It was incredibly valuable for us to be able to make those trade-offs, because ultimately these Xbox One titles are the ones that we… wanted to get up to 4K.
We also leveraged the fact that we understand the AMD architecture really, really well now and how well it does on our games, so we were able to go through and examine a lot of the internal queues and buffers and caches and FIFOs that make up this very deep pipeline that, if you can find the right areas that are causing bottlenecks, for very small area [on the processor] we could increase those sizes and get effective wins.
Het hele verhaal, wat bijzonder technisch is, is te lezen op Eurogamer.net. De volledige specificaties vind je onderaan, evenals foto’s van de techniek in de Scorpio. Tijdens de demo voor Eurogamer toonde Microsoft games om hun feiten hard te maken. Zo werd Forza getoond. De game draaide op een volle 4K resolutie met zestig frames per seconde. Zoals je op de screenshot kunt zien werd maar zestig tot 70 procent van de GPU gebruikt, iets wat erg indrukwekkend is. Tijdens de demo reed het maximale aantal auto’s op het circuit en stonde alle AI’s en physic simulaties aan.
Verder zullen dit jaar nog Red Dead Redemption 2, Star Wars Battlefront II, Crackdown 3 en Forza Motorsport 7 gebruik maken van de 4K technologie.
Chris Tecton, Turn 10 Studio Software Architect:
This is us. This is ForzaTech running 60 frames a second, 4K. We’re still running with settings that we would have used in Forza 6… but this is also including 4K content… we’ve got authored assets for this set of the models, cars, tracks everything. We pushed it through and made sure the 4K textures were flowing through. We’ve got them all there at the right resolutions and they’re not giving us enough of a bandwidth hit to offset that. If we drop back to when we originally ran and we didn’t have 4K assets, it was maybe one per cent different. We were very much bound on a different point than memory bandwidth. It’s been awesome and this is the point it’s at.
In onderstaande tabel zie je exact wat de specificaties zijn. Links zie je de Xbox Scorpio, in het midden de Xbox One en rechts de PlayStation 4 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 |
Hoe dit er in de Xbox Scorpio uit gaat zien? Dat zie je op onderstaande foto’s. Het uiterlijk van de console, de prijs en de datum zijn dus nog niet onthuld. Daar gaan we vast tijdens de E3 meer over horen.
