Game enthusiasts and industry personnel walk between the Microsoft XBox and the Sony PlayStation exhibits at the Annual Gaming Industry Conference E3 at the Los Angeles Convention Center on June 16, 2015 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo : Getty Images/Christian Petersen)
Microsoft has designed the Xbox Scorpio to slay the Sony PlayStation 4, new reports said, belying the rumors that upcoming is a mid-generation bump from the Xbox One. The gaming machine will deliver processing might both in CPU and GPU terms and the welcome feature of backward compatibility with existing game titles.
The latter will mean that Xbox fans planning to upgrade later this 2017 will not lose their library of gaming titles, according to Forbes. "The general thrust is that this is a super-powerful Xbox machine, capable of native rendering in 4K and playing nice with VR," the report said.
The latest details were sourced from the NeoGAF forums, from which developer Thomas Mahler asserted that "Scorpio isn't just a half-assed upgrade ... but a full blown next-gen machine that's just backwards-compatible to your current library."
The touted Xbox Scorpio power, specifically the graphics engine might, is likely fired up by AMD's Radeon Polaris and or even Vega GPUs, WCCFTech reported. The GPU compute power gain will render the Scorpio with more than four times the graphics rendering capabilities than its immediate predecessor.
Potentially, the Scorpio will readily outmuscle even the PS4 Pro if these rumored specs bumps will prove accurate, the same report indicated.
"The six teraflop GPU is once again confirmed ... Four times more L2 cache is also confirmed ... The GPU architecture in Scorpio is at least as modern as AMD's Polaris line ... We can reasonably assume that Microsoft can customize its GPU core just as Sony did, with access to Radeon roadmap features up to - and perhaps beyond - AMD's upcoming Vega architecture," WCCFTech quoted a recently leaked report on the Xbox Scorpio as saying.
Yet while backward compatibility will surely make Xbox One owners happy, there will be inevitable downsides, Forbes said. One would be the glaring absence of the enhanced visual treat that will come with fresh gaming titles.
Also, 4K rendering is not much of a benefit for most gamers as the same report argued that the high-resolution remains remotely the TV standard nowadays.
At any rate, the Xbox Scorpio seems to be shaping up as a full generation upgrade from the Xbox One but the confirmation will only happen come the introduction and release date of the console, which reports said will be timed with the 2017 holiday season.
