The Xbox Scorpio is destined for release next year during the holiday season. A lot of talk and a lot of hype is now surrounding what's being referred to as the biggest and baddest console coming to the market. Well, Xbox head honcho Phil Spencer revealed how far along they are with its development.
As pointed out in the tweet from Phil Spencer's official Twitter account, he was asked if developers are already working on projects for the Xbox Scorpio. He runs the gamut of features that the developers are taking advantage of with the Xbox Scorpio at the moment, which includes its beefier new hardware, the platform capabilities, and the games.
Unfortunately, Phil Spencer does not specify if the Xbox Scorpio games will be exclusive to the Scorpio, or if they're also cross-generational titles between the Xbox One and the Xbox Scorpio. This makes a huge difference in the scope and potential of a game when it's cross-generational.
Basically when a game is a cross-generation release it means that it can take advantage of some of the newer hardware's capabilities, such as increased draw distance, higher, and more LOD models rendered to the screen within a scene, as well as sharper textures and higher resolution. However, core gameplay mechanics and many core CPU functions will be limited and scaled back to fit the older generation hardware. Usually cross-generation games suffer from being made for the lowest common denominator, which severely hampers their potential.
Microsoft is basically using the Xbox Scorpio as a jumping off point from the Xbox One. It will be able to do and run everything the Xbox One can, but the Scorpio will be able to run games natively at 4K resolutions and will have an octa-core CPU based architecture that can still run operations that are native to the Jaguar APUs, along with 320GB/s memory bandwidth. However, they don't mention if that's shared bandwidth between system operations and graphics operations, if that's graphics operations alone, or if that's just the general bandwidth of the system itself. They did, however, mention that the Xbox Scorpio would run a 6TF GPU, which is fairly powerful but doubts are cast on whether or not it will be able to run games in high-fidelity at 4K. If it's a proprietary chip then anything is possible. If it's based on off-the-shelf architecture like the Xbox One, then curb your enthusiasm and temper your hopes.
If what Phil Spencer is saying is true and developers are already hard at work on Xbox Scorpio games, then it means that the hardware is a lot more final then we may have thought.
Microsoft confirming that the console is due for release next fall means that they most certainly have a legitimate stake in wanting to take control of the console arena. If the console is stable, powerful and has a strong line-up of games, then Microsoft could be looking at rekindling the era that made the Xbox 360 as popular as it was.
We'll still have to wait for more info and details on the Xbox Scorpio specs leading up to its release.
