Microsoft’s Project Scorpio Specs Unveiled, Has The Potential To Outperform Sony’s PS4 Pro

It’s commonplace for hardware to get incremental upgrades. The video game industry is no stranger to this practice; Nintendo often provides enhanced versions of their handhelds, a la the New Nintendo 3DS to the old Nintendo 3DS. Sony has also released the PlayStation 4 Pro, a strengthened PlayStation 4.

Microsoft is developing such an improvement for the Xbox One and Xbox One S, codenamed Project Scorpio, and today we received our first look at it.

MICROSOFT’S XBOX ONE UPGRADE, PROJECT SCORPIO

Digital Foundry received the exclusive scoop, so please head over there for the complete story.

The Scorpio offers ameliorations over the Xbox One, and Microsoft is aiming to comfortably reach 4K visuals. Furthermore, prior Xbox One games as well as backwards compatible Xbox 360 games will benefit from the extra power. Scorpio’s specs are as follows:

• CPU: Eight custom x86 cores clocked at 2.3GHz
• GPU: 40 customized compute units at 1172MHz
• RAM: 12GB GDDR5
• Memory Bandwidth: 326GB/s
• Hard Drive: 1TB
• Optical Drive: 4K UHD Blu-ray

A trial of Forza Motorsport 6, a recent entry in one of Microsoft’s strongest IPs, was used to highlight the Scorpio’s potential. The demo took two days to port over, and it ran at 4K while maintaining 60 frames-per-second. This took approximately 60 to 70 percent of the Scorpio’s power to do, whereas the Xbox One would require 90 percent of its power to run the game at 1080p.

Finally, the Scorpio has the technology to outperform Sony’s PlayStation 4 Pro. For those who need a translator to discern what the Scorpio will offer prospective buyers, you can find a guide over yonder.

Project Scorpio’s true name, price and release date will be revealed at a later time. Considering how E3 is coming up, we may likely learn more then.

Xbox One owners, will you upgrade to a Scorpio?