The Xbox Scorpio
The XBOX Scorpio
The Atari, the Nintendo 64, the original PlayStation and Xbox were all great consoles and marvels of their time. Why were and are consoles such a hit with people? People used to play games on arcade units. These boxes with circuit boards behind them with 8 bit displays were the rage back in the day. Then a little while later consoles were introduced, the gaming units of the living room where a guy/girl could lay back on the couch, enjoy a cold beverage and immerse himself/herself in the realms of various games. Even PC gamers like myself must admit that there is no replacement for the couch experience a console offers, however limited the power of consoles might be they are the most popular gaming platforms to date. Although consoles might seem like perfect gaming machines, I assure you they are not. With limited functionality and power consoles are very restricting to innovative developers who want to develop games with graphics that exceed the power of a console. This isn’t surprising as consoles are usually priced from 200 to 300$. Will that ever change? It finally might, I say might in the strongest sense of the word, with the release of the XBOX Scorpio this fall. It was first announced at E3 this past year. The Xbox Scorpio will never be a “PC killer”, but it might be a machine that might finally compare to PC’s you can build today. You will always be able to build a PC better than the Xbox Scorpio. But it’s no laughing matter either, being advertised as a 4K capable machine the Xbox Scorpio must have the specifications that will back that up. Well you might also ask, what if it’s another ‘PS4 pro’? The mid generation successor to the PS4 was also advertised as being 4K capable at first, but that was a blatant lie. The PS4 pro does not have power to output native 4K games, it’s just plain impossible to play games at true 4K on the PS4 pro. It is a performance bump from the PS4, but the console is not 4K capable. What the console does is play games at weird resolutions near the 1080p mark and then uses a technology called Checkerboarding to upscale the image to a 4K like picture. (We will be explaining Checkerboarding in a post coming up soon.) Will Xbox follow in Sony’s footsteps? That is a possibility. But Microsoft is continuously reporting that their upcoming IP launch will deliver true 4K games. Here is a cursory run down of the specifications I gathered from numerous reputable websites:
The Atari, the Nintendo 64, the original PlayStation and Xbox were all great consoles and marvels of their time. Why were and are consoles such a hit with people? People used to play games on arcade units. These boxes with circuit boards behind them with 8 bit displays were the rage back in the day. Then a little while later consoles were introduced, the gaming units of the living room where a guy/girl could lay back on the couch, enjoy a cold beverage and immerse himself/herself in the realms of various games. Even PC gamers like myself must admit that there is no replacement for the couch experience a console offers, however limited the power of consoles might be they are the most popular gaming platforms to date. Although consoles might seem like perfect gaming machines, I assure you they are not. With limited functionality and power consoles are very restricting to innovative developers who want to develop games with graphics that exceed the power of a console. This isn’t surprising as consoles are usually priced from 200 to 300$. Will that ever change? It finally might, I say might in the strongest sense of the word, with the release of the XBOX Scorpio this fall. It was first announced at E3 this past year. The Xbox Scorpio will never be a “PC killer”, but it might be a machine that might finally compare to PC’s you can build today. You will always be able to build a PC better than the Xbox Scorpio. But it’s no laughing matter either, being advertised as a 4K capable machine the Xbox Scorpio must have the specifications that will back that up. Well you might also ask, what if it’s another ‘PS4 pro’? The mid generation successor to the PS4 was also advertised as being 4K capable at first, but that was a blatant lie. The PS4 pro does not have power to output native 4K games, it’s just plain impossible to play games at true 4K on the PS4 pro. It is a performance bump from the PS4, but the console is not 4K capable. What the console does is play games at weird resolutions near the 1080p mark and then uses a technology called Checkerboarding to upscale the image to a 4K like picture. (We will be explaining Checkerboarding in a post coming up soon.) Will Xbox follow in Sony’s footsteps? That is a possibility. But Microsoft is continuously reporting that their upcoming IP launch will deliver true 4K games. Here is a cursory run down of the specifications I gathered from numerous reputable websites:
A graphics card (almost certainly made
by AMD possibly based on their new Vega line, a direct contender of the Nvidia Pascal, with a whopping 6 tera flops
graphical computing power which is in line with the new Nvidia Gtx 1070, mind you a very powerful card at 400$ for
the
reference version. 6 tera flops is almost 6 times the power of the original PS4 which had a measly 1.2 TFPS. To be
frank
a 6 tera flops (trillion floating operations per second) is not a grandiose on its own, but it is a huge improvement
over the current generation and is amazing to see in a console predicted to be priced at 500-699$. The Xbox Scorpio
is
also rumoured to have an 8 core CPU, again probably made by AMD (hopefully based on the new Ryzen architecture).
With a
memory bandwidth of 320 GB/sec the Xbox Scorpio will definitely be a leap in terms of visual fidelity from its
predecessor the Xbox one or the Xbox one S. The console is also capable of 4K Blu-ray HDR video streaming, so
streaming
shows on Netflix and Hulu on your Xbox is possible unlike the PS4 pro even though Sony is the proprietary owner of
the
Blu-ray technology (Wtf Sony).
With the amazing specs the machine will have and game optimization 4K is not only possible it is probable. If you ask me, PC will always be better, but for people who are couch gamers the Xbox Scorpio seems like the only choice. But, keep in mind this is all speculation and we will not know for sure if Microsoft will deliver on all they promised.
With the amazing specs the machine will have and game optimization 4K is not only possible it is probable. If you ask me, PC will always be better, but for people who are couch gamers the Xbox Scorpio seems like the only choice. But, keep in mind this is all speculation and we will not know for sure if Microsoft will deliver on all they promised.
This is Kerod with ICT signing off.