Xbox One X
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Or offer an "Xbox Replay" package, like Rare had.
Having commentaries and rewards like that, about the foundation and build of the original Xbox would be neat.
And fan service is always charming!
for native 4K, the games needs to be patched and have 4k assets to look good.
For the tech guys....loooong article. The stuff I copied below is just a small part.
As far as I can understand, it basically confirms a mix of Polaris and Vega.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2017-the-scorpio-engine-in-depth
Inside the Scorpio Engine: the processor architecture deep dive
How the chip that powers the next Xbox was made.
By Richard Leadbetter Published 15/04/2017
Editor's note: This one is for the hardcore. We've already covered Project Scorpio's hardware specs in broader detail, and posted critical analysis of everything we've seen so far, but for those of you hungry for more detail, who want to know absolutely everything shared with us, this is the place to be. We'll be running a similar deep dive on the construction of the retail console tomorrow.
If there's a recurring theme in our discussions with the hardware architects of Project Scorpio's new processor, it's customisation. And to be fair, PlayStation 4 system architect Mark Cerny made very similar points when I met up with him last year to discuss PS4 Pro. "It's not a process of calling up AMD and saying I'll take this part, this part and this part," says Kevin Gammill, Group Program Manager of the Xbox Core Platform. "A lot of really specific custom work went into this."
More Project Scorpio coverage
Of course, the base hardware designs across the various components and blocks within the Scorpio Engine SoC (system on chip) are indeed based on technology derived from AMD - the CPU technology has been customised to the point where Microsoft doesn't refer to them as Jaguar architecture any more, but that is clearly the starting point from which the Project Scorpio design began. Similarly, Scorpio's Radeon graphics core has features from AMD's latest Polaris architecture - but there is no equivalent part to it in the PC space. We've moved on from PS4 and Xbox One, where the basic GPU configurations (compute units, texture units, ROPs) at least mapped relatively closely to off-the-shelf PC parts.
"It's a completely unique design... you wouldn't be able to buy this anywhere else and really, we created this is in conjunction with AMD and it is a nice unique part for Scorpio," says Nick Baker, Distinguished Engineer, Silicon.
"The few high-level constraints and goals in the programme were to really say, we wanted to be the most powerful 4K gaming console. The other key area was to maintain full back-compat with Xbox One and One S titles and also to retain features we added in on those consoles to allow Xbox 360 compatibility as well. If you look at how we came up with the architecture those were the most important goals we wanted to keep in mind," Baker continues. "Key differentiators for Xbox that we wanted to retain and extend for Scorpio: we have CPU/GPU coherency, the GPU virtualisation support, the audio processing that's being used for spatial audio. We have the powerful and flexible display output processor we're using for super-sampling for 1080p TVs, for example, and we kept and extended and improved the GameDVR support too."
Years before any silicon arrived back from chip manufacturing giant TSMC, the Xbox team began by carrying a vast range of simulation and analysis. As Project Scorpio is effectively a mid-generation refresh - an extension of the existing console designed primarily for 4K screens - existing game code captured at a granular level via the PIX (Performance Investigator for Xbox) tool could be run on potential hardware designs, well before Microsoft went to AMD.
As far as I can understand, it basically confirms a mix of Polaris and Vega.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2017-the-scorpio-engine-in-depth
Inside the Scorpio Engine: the processor architecture deep dive
How the chip that powers the next Xbox was made.
By Richard Leadbetter Published 15/04/2017
Editor's note: This one is for the hardcore. We've already covered Project Scorpio's hardware specs in broader detail, and posted critical analysis of everything we've seen so far, but for those of you hungry for more detail, who want to know absolutely everything shared with us, this is the place to be. We'll be running a similar deep dive on the construction of the retail console tomorrow.
If there's a recurring theme in our discussions with the hardware architects of Project Scorpio's new processor, it's customisation. And to be fair, PlayStation 4 system architect Mark Cerny made very similar points when I met up with him last year to discuss PS4 Pro. "It's not a process of calling up AMD and saying I'll take this part, this part and this part," says Kevin Gammill, Group Program Manager of the Xbox Core Platform. "A lot of really specific custom work went into this."
More Project Scorpio coverage
Of course, the base hardware designs across the various components and blocks within the Scorpio Engine SoC (system on chip) are indeed based on technology derived from AMD - the CPU technology has been customised to the point where Microsoft doesn't refer to them as Jaguar architecture any more, but that is clearly the starting point from which the Project Scorpio design began. Similarly, Scorpio's Radeon graphics core has features from AMD's latest Polaris architecture - but there is no equivalent part to it in the PC space. We've moved on from PS4 and Xbox One, where the basic GPU configurations (compute units, texture units, ROPs) at least mapped relatively closely to off-the-shelf PC parts.
"It's a completely unique design... you wouldn't be able to buy this anywhere else and really, we created this is in conjunction with AMD and it is a nice unique part for Scorpio," says Nick Baker, Distinguished Engineer, Silicon.
"The few high-level constraints and goals in the programme were to really say, we wanted to be the most powerful 4K gaming console. The other key area was to maintain full back-compat with Xbox One and One S titles and also to retain features we added in on those consoles to allow Xbox 360 compatibility as well. If you look at how we came up with the architecture those were the most important goals we wanted to keep in mind," Baker continues. "Key differentiators for Xbox that we wanted to retain and extend for Scorpio: we have CPU/GPU coherency, the GPU virtualisation support, the audio processing that's being used for spatial audio. We have the powerful and flexible display output processor we're using for super-sampling for 1080p TVs, for example, and we kept and extended and improved the GameDVR support too."
Years before any silicon arrived back from chip manufacturing giant TSMC, the Xbox team began by carrying a vast range of simulation and analysis. As Project Scorpio is effectively a mid-generation refresh - an extension of the existing console designed primarily for 4K screens - existing game code captured at a granular level via the PIX (Performance Investigator for Xbox) tool could be run on potential hardware designs, well before Microsoft went to AMD.
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As much as I'm looking forward to native 4k gaming, I was pleased to see this Goosen guy say this
"In terms of the panoply of implementations we're going to see for Scorpio native games, I expect quite a range. I wouldn't be surprised to see games running at 1080p on Xbox One... they might use checkerboard and then they use the remaining GPU to really impact visual quality,"
I'd love to see what developers could do with the hardware only targeting a native 1080p and upscaling from there. I'm sure we'll see some devs in the coming years opt for this and aim for maximum visual candy. Fingers crossed.
"In terms of the panoply of implementations we're going to see for Scorpio native games, I expect quite a range. I wouldn't be surprised to see games running at 1080p on Xbox One... they might use checkerboard and then they use the remaining GPU to really impact visual quality,"
I'd love to see what developers could do with the hardware only targeting a native 1080p and upscaling from there. I'm sure we'll see some devs in the coming years opt for this and aim for maximum visual candy. Fingers crossed.
"the CPU technology has been customised to the point where Microsoft doesn't refer to them as Jaguar architecture any more"
Whether that's marketing speak or something else, bottom line is there doesn't appear to be the bottlenecks to do what they want the system to do today. Zen would've future proofed this against future consoles from the competition but that's what the next Xbox is for.
Outside of Freesync, Scorpio is a get results here and now console without much built in to hold up 3 years from now.
"the CPU technology has been customised to the point where Microsoft doesn't refer to them as Jaguar architecture any more"
At least one poster in here is now eating a big piece of humble pie
"the CPU technology has been customised to the point where Microsoft doesn't refer to them as Jaguar architecture any more"
Reading this most recent article in conjunction with the info we already knew, it's clear that Scorpio is not a future proof machine. MS is being pretty transparent about it. It's a machine to enhance Xbox One games as much as possible today. Not something that takes 3 years to really get cooking. The CPU doesn't have that much Zen. MS actually admits to having less Vega in their GPU than the Pro in this article. They weren't going to spend time and money adding features that developers won't leverage right away. The 60 customizations they talk about are all for the developers...based on removing bottlenecks and maximizing efficiencies with their existing game engines. Not to create new techniques or secret sauces for the next generations of game engines to utilize. A lot of the stuff we originally read and thought were new techniques actually existed on Xbox One but will be implemented better from hardware level here.
It's not that exciting or interesting from a hardware standpoint. We don't have that next gen hardware mystery or "I wonder what games will do 4 years from now". It does make sense. If hardware releases every 3 years, there might be less magic in consoles going forward. From here on out it's subsidized upper-mid PCs at launch where it's more important to maximize hardware immediately rather than create magic that developers struggle to unlock over the course of 3 to 4 years.
It's not that exciting or interesting from a hardware standpoint. We don't have that next gen hardware mystery or "I wonder what games will do 4 years from now". It does make sense. If hardware releases every 3 years, there might be less magic in consoles going forward. From here on out it's subsidized upper-mid PCs at launch where it's more important to maximize hardware immediately rather than create magic that developers struggle to unlock over the course of 3 to 4 years.
As people here have mentioned before, we're really at the point of diminishing returns. It would take a huge power jump to show any big difference graphically. That being the case, I'd rather it be this way so we don't have to wait a few years for devs to get the hang of new hardware, etc. Upgrades won't be necessary unless you want the latest and greatest, so you won't need to buy a new system to play the newest games.
See I read, it's a new design on the CPU that no one else has and can't be pegged against any known variation.
I read that the power of the design is going to allow developers to do what they want to push their games to a level we have never seen before.
I read, this is key, that it will be the most powerful console ever.......to the next hardware revision from SONY or a new player in the market Apple? Let's face it Nintendo will never play in this space again.
Agree with all of that. I've said before the Scorpio unveiling, it would take orders of magnitude more power to make games feel evolved. Graphics are at a point of diminishing returns and games are super expensive now. Even with added power, developers don't have the resources to add a ton more detail. Hardware evolution is about resolution and frame rate today because there's only so much more detail that can be added. It's smart to focus on the here and now. Any game that Spencer greenlit since announcing Scorpio probably won't be released before the next Xbox hardware if it's a maga-budget game fully pushing the hardware to it's limits....especially if it focused on new development techniques to take advantage of new hardware magic.
At some point we may see something with lighting like real time ray tracing that can be automatically implemented without developers having to do much extra...but we're not there yet.
I still have hope that Cloud compute can come into play for new ways to impliment AI and physics. That dream can still live beyond the Scorpio madness.
I've read the Scorpio leads tell developers to focus on high end PC hardware and port down to Scorpio and Xbox One. All these modifications are aimed at making that as easy as possible. That's actually a good thing and yes, indirectly you may see a jump in games because high end pc hardware may be optimized better than it is today. The audience of people that would actually experience well optimized 4K games has been low until now. There's not even a market of Freesync 4K HDR monitors available yet. All these games will work on OG Xbox One so there's not a secret saunce that will create something not possible before. It will just run faster, be more detailed while having a cleaner, clearer picture on Scorpio.
I think a lot of people don't understand the importance of optimization. A lot of gamers with high end rigs didn't believe that Scorpio could produce 4K at stable frame rates because they have similar specs and can't produce 4K. It's not the hardware. It's the lack of optimization by developers.
The secret sauce of the Scorpio isn't power. It's making the optimization process for developers much better. Scorpio doesn't run faster than the specs due to the customizations. It will be easier for developers to optimize what is there due to the customizations.
http://gamingbolt.com/xbox-scorpio-...gnificant-performance-benefits-relative-to-pc
Xbox Scorpio Technical Lead: “Scorpio Has Significant Performance Benefits Relative To PC”
Project Scorpio is shaping up to be an amazing piece of hardware and Microsoft are clearly leaving no stone unturned to make it the most powerful console of all time. The new system is powerful than the Xbox One, Xbox One S, PS4 and even PS4 Pro but what kind of benefits will it provide compared to the baseline Radeon equivalent of Scorpio’s GPU?
In an interview with Digital Foundry, Scorpio’s Technical Lead Andrew Goossen stated that although he doesn’t have any specific examples to state (possibly indicating towards a GPU series), the Scorpio’s GPU includes a number of features that simply can’t be implemented on the PC with a comparable GPU TFLOPs. Among these improvements include a better shader compiler and improvements to PIX which allows developers to achieve low level analysis.
“Our performance analysis and modelling was so core to the entire design process of optimisation and adjustments that I don’t have a specific example to call out. We put every change we considered through the model. But in terms of ‘more from your teraflops’, I will point out that Scorpio has significant performance benefits relative to PC,” he stated.
“Microsoft has made continual improvements to the shader compiler. We see significant performance wins for Xbox game content relative to compiling the same shaders on PC. [Secondly], ‘to the metal’ API and shader extension support allows developer to optimise in ways that simply can’t be done on PC cards. [Finally], PIX provides low level analysis and insight that, in conjunction with ‘to the metal’ support, allows developers to make the most of the console GPU. These technologies are all already mature and familiar to developers, so Scorpio games will benefit from the get go,” he further added.
It will be interesting to see what kind of results we can see from this in terms of software. Microsoft haven’t revealed any games running on the Scorpio, except this screenshot from Forza Motorsport 6 but judging by the inclusion of custom shader improvements and updated PIX features, the Scorpio can possibly deliver better looking games compared to an equivalent GPU hardware on PC.
Xbox Scorpio Technical Lead: “Scorpio Has Significant Performance Benefits Relative To PC”
Project Scorpio is shaping up to be an amazing piece of hardware and Microsoft are clearly leaving no stone unturned to make it the most powerful console of all time. The new system is powerful than the Xbox One, Xbox One S, PS4 and even PS4 Pro but what kind of benefits will it provide compared to the baseline Radeon equivalent of Scorpio’s GPU?
In an interview with Digital Foundry, Scorpio’s Technical Lead Andrew Goossen stated that although he doesn’t have any specific examples to state (possibly indicating towards a GPU series), the Scorpio’s GPU includes a number of features that simply can’t be implemented on the PC with a comparable GPU TFLOPs. Among these improvements include a better shader compiler and improvements to PIX which allows developers to achieve low level analysis.
“Our performance analysis and modelling was so core to the entire design process of optimisation and adjustments that I don’t have a specific example to call out. We put every change we considered through the model. But in terms of ‘more from your teraflops’, I will point out that Scorpio has significant performance benefits relative to PC,” he stated.
“Microsoft has made continual improvements to the shader compiler. We see significant performance wins for Xbox game content relative to compiling the same shaders on PC. [Secondly], ‘to the metal’ API and shader extension support allows developer to optimise in ways that simply can’t be done on PC cards. [Finally], PIX provides low level analysis and insight that, in conjunction with ‘to the metal’ support, allows developers to make the most of the console GPU. These technologies are all already mature and familiar to developers, so Scorpio games will benefit from the get go,” he further added.
It will be interesting to see what kind of results we can see from this in terms of software. Microsoft haven’t revealed any games running on the Scorpio, except this screenshot from Forza Motorsport 6 but judging by the inclusion of custom shader improvements and updated PIX features, the Scorpio can possibly deliver better looking games compared to an equivalent GPU hardware on PC.
Xbox Scorpio could eliminate console generations — and that's a good thing
Samit Sarkar
/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/54267025/xbox_scorpio_motherboard_1920.0.png)
A glimpse of Scorpio’s guts.
Digital Foundry
Sony’s PlayStation 4 Pro, which launched last November, and Microsoft’s upcoming Project Scorpio represent the first significant hardware upgrades to come in the middle of a traditional console generation. Both systems are built for 4K televisions, even though the majority of customers don’t yet own one.
The companies have had a tough time convincing consumers of the merits of these devices, but in an interview with Gamasutra, Xbox head Phil Spencer said that Scorpio isn’t just a more powerful Xbox One — it represents an overhaul of the philosophy behind Microsoft’s games business.
Microsoft’s pitch is that, yes, Scorpio will be the most powerful gaming console ever, making it the best place to play Xbox One and multiplatform titles for people who don’t own a powerful gaming computer but care about graphics and performance. The company also says that because it’s building Scorpio as an expansion of the Xbox platform, rather than a typical new console, Scorpio will enable games to live longer.
Don’t look back in anger
Until now, games have generally been locked to the console on which they were released. They might run slightly better on a future device that supports them via backward compatibility, but even a feature like that usually goes back just one console generation. A new system’s launch generally means that the old one’s games, controllers and everything else are now obsolete.
There’s no reason that consumers or game makers have to forget about old games just because a new platform has arrived, except for the fact that that’s just the way things have always been done in the console world. Customers put up with that because a new console promises a major increase in power and other capabilities. But with Scorpio, Microsoft is looking to deliver that while maintaining compatibility with the past. Of course, the PS4 Pro did this to an extent last fall, but Microsoft is hoping that Scorpio’s significant power advantage will eliminate the benefit of Sony’s one-year head start.
console games will look and run the best on this platform,” it’s perhaps the more important one.
“There’s some clear benefits of [the traditional console philosophy],” Spencer told Gamasutra. “I can tailor my games specifically to the hardware platform that I’m building towards. But it means you end up with this kind of land-locked content that it’s hard to go play.”
Instead, the arrival of Scorpio will bring the Xbox platform closer than ever to the PC ecosystem. These days, PC gamers can buy tons of decades-old games from services like Steam and GOG, and many of those titles can function on modern computers without too much tweaking. The Xbox One can play a growing library of Xbox 360 games, thanks to a not-insignificant engineering effort on Microsoft’s part. Meanwhile, Sony and Nintendo are happy to let you pay for old games again and again (PlayStation 2 Classics, PlayStation Now, Virtual Console).
There are once again a lot of people playing Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, thanks to Xbox One backward compatibility.
Treyarch/Activision
Backward compatibility works for both game makers and consumers. The PC platform is a continuum that evolves over time, but that doesn’t preclude publishers from releasing remasters of old games. And customers who buy a game once can feel safe in the knowledge that they’ll still be able to play it years down the line, regardless of whether they have the original console lying around and still hooked up. (This could also make people more comfortable with going digital — they might not be able to trade in old games, but at least they’ll still be able to play them.)
This also ties into Microsoft’s efforts to blur the lines between Xbox and Windows. Initiatives like Xbox Play Anywhere are another way to free customers from the constraints of consoles, offering an experience that scales and syncs across Xbox One and PC. The Nintendo Switch tackles this problem from a different angle — the games are the same in your hands and on a TV — but Nintendo has a terrible track record when it comes to managing content ownership across multiple platforms and devices. Microsoft already has that part figured out.
Free your mind (from console generations)
The industry has been moving toward “games as a service” for quite some time now, and people who follow the business have already tired of that buzzphrase. But it’s more true than ever — it’s rare today for even an indie game to be released and never updated.
We’ve also begun to see games that go across console generations. Destiny players on PS3 and Xbox 360 can transfer their characters to PS4 or Xbox One, respectively, if they upgrade. Rock Band 4 allows people to import almost all of their previously purchased songs, and the game is compatible with last-generation instrument controllers, too. But the import process is clunky — perhaps because the Xbox 360 and Xbox One, and the PS3 and PS4, weren’t designed to work together in this way.
“When we thought about our tools, I said okay, games are going to live longer than we’re used to them living on our platform,” Spencer told Gamasutra. “Which means from the service capability and monetization standpoint, we’ve got to go build tools so that they can continue to give content and services and other things to the customers.”
The elimination of console generations as we know them could incentivize game developers and publishers to continue supporting ongoing and older titles. Backward compatibility could goose the sales of a beloved game, as it did last summer for Red Dead Redemption. Now that Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 is playable on Xbox One, its player base has swelled to a level higher than that of 2016’s Infinite Warfare. Would a drop of new content make sense all of a sudden?
“There are advantages to the console generations, but I wanted to try to evolve our capability to kind of have the best of both,” said Spencer. “Old games that work well, new games that are innovative, and hardware platforms that could scale.”
This is the best-of-both-worlds argument that Spencer first made a year ago — before Microsoft announced Scorpio — when he told Polygon, “I look at the ecosystem that a console sits in and I think that it should have the capability of more iteration on hardware capability.” If Microsoft is indeed changing the way it thinks about the Xbox platform, and the company’s future consoles will continue to be compatible with Xbox One games, it seems like it would be a win-win situation for everyone involved.I'm
Xbox Scorpio could eliminate console generations — and that's a good thing
Samit Sarkar
A glimpse of Scorpio’s guts.
Digital Foundry
Sony’s PlayStation 4 Pro, which launched last November, and Microsoft’s upcoming Project Scorpio represent the first significant hardware upgrades to come in the middle of a traditional console generation. Both systems are built for 4K televisions, even though the majority of customers don’t yet own one.
The companies have had a tough time convincing consumers of the merits of these devices, but in an interview with Gamasutra, Xbox head Phil Spencer said that Scorpio isn’t just a more powerful Xbox One — it represents an overhaul of the philosophy behind Microsoft’s games business.
Microsoft’s pitch is that, yes, Scorpio will be the most powerful gaming console ever, making it the best place to play Xbox One and multiplatform titles for people who don’t own a powerful gaming computer but care about graphics and performance. The company also says that because it’s building Scorpio as an expansion of the Xbox platform, rather than a typical new console, Scorpio will enable games to live longer.
Don’t look back in anger
Until now, games have generally been locked to the console on which they were released. They might run slightly better on a future device that supports them via backward compatibility, but even a feature like that usually goes back just one console generation. A new system’s launch generally means that the old one’s games, controllers and everything else are now obsolete.
There’s no reason that consumers or game makers have to forget about old games just because a new platform has arrived, except for the fact that that’s just the way things have always been done in the console world. Customers put up with that because a new console promises a major increase in power and other capabilities. But with Scorpio, Microsoft is looking to deliver that while maintaining compatibility with the past. Of course, the PS4 Pro did this to an extent last fall, but Microsoft is hoping that Scorpio’s significant power advantage will eliminate the benefit of Sony’s one-year head start.
console games will look and run the best on this platform,” it’s perhaps the more important one.
“There’s some clear benefits of [the traditional console philosophy],” Spencer told Gamasutra. “I can tailor my games specifically to the hardware platform that I’m building towards. But it means you end up with this kind of land-locked content that it’s hard to go play.”
Instead, the arrival of Scorpio will bring the Xbox platform closer than ever to the PC ecosystem. These days, PC gamers can buy tons of decades-old games from services like Steam and GOG, and many of those titles can function on modern computers without too much tweaking. The Xbox One can play a growing library of Xbox 360 games, thanks to a not-insignificant engineering effort on Microsoft’s part. Meanwhile, Sony and Nintendo are happy to let you pay for old games again and again (PlayStation 2 Classics, PlayStation Now, Virtual Console).
There are once again a lot of people playing Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, thanks to Xbox One backward compatibility.
Treyarch/Activision
Backward compatibility works for both game makers and consumers. The PC platform is a continuum that evolves over time, but that doesn’t preclude publishers from releasing remasters of old games. And customers who buy a game once can feel safe in the knowledge that they’ll still be able to play it years down the line, regardless of whether they have the original console lying around and still hooked up. (This could also make people more comfortable with going digital — they might not be able to trade in old games, but at least they’ll still be able to play them.)
This also ties into Microsoft’s efforts to blur the lines between Xbox and Windows. Initiatives like Xbox Play Anywhere are another way to free customers from the constraints of consoles, offering an experience that scales and syncs across Xbox One and PC. The Nintendo Switch tackles this problem from a different angle — the games are the same in your hands and on a TV — but Nintendo has a terrible track record when it comes to managing content ownership across multiple platforms and devices. Microsoft already has that part figured out.
Free your mind (from console generations)
The industry has been moving toward “games as a service” for quite some time now, and people who follow the business have already tired of that buzzphrase. But it’s more true than ever — it’s rare today for even an indie game to be released and never updated.
We’ve also begun to see games that go across console generations. Destiny players on PS3 and Xbox 360 can transfer their characters to PS4 or Xbox One, respectively, if they upgrade. Rock Band 4 allows people to import almost all of their previously purchased songs, and the game is compatible with last-generation instrument controllers, too. But the import process is clunky — perhaps because the Xbox 360 and Xbox One, and the PS3 and PS4, weren’t designed to work together in this way.
“When we thought about our tools, I said okay, games are going to live longer than we’re used to them living on our platform,” Spencer told Gamasutra. “Which means from the service capability and monetization standpoint, we’ve got to go build tools so that they can continue to give content and services and other things to the customers.”
Rockstar San Diego/Rockstar Games
The elimination of console generations as we know them could incentivize game developers and publishers to continue supporting ongoing and older titles. Backward compatibility could goose the sales of a beloved game, as it did last summer for Red Dead Redemption. Now that Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 is playable on Xbox One, its player base has swelled to a level higher than that of 2016’s Infinite Warfare. Would a drop of new content make sense all of a sudden?
“There are advantages to the console generations, but I wanted to try to evolve our capability to kind of have the best of both,” said Spencer. “Old games that work well, new games that are innovative, and hardware platforms that could scale.”
This is the best-of-both-worlds argument that Spencer first made a year ago — before Microsoft announced Scorpio — when he told Polygon, “I look at the ecosystem that a console sits in and I think that it should have the capability of more iteration on hardware capability.” If Microsoft is indeed changing the way it thinks about the Xbox platform, and the company’s future consoles will continue to be compatible with Xbox One games, it seems like it would be a win-win situation for everyone involved.I'm
This is precisely why it is so important that Microsoft stays in the game. They push the industry forward. Innovative ideas like the ones behind Scorpio is just what the industry needs. Day one.
I just watched that. This is pretty crazy.
Dee is someone I will never take as a real person talking. Some of the stuff he is saying is a bit out of control.
I like that they appear to be keeping the Xbox One name. Across the internet, you saw people saying that they should start fresh. Why? This is clearly their chance to change the definition of the name Xbox One. That article perfectly describes why. It's One place where all Xbox games (currently exuding OG games) That's a huge mission statement!
Given everything that they've gone through to get the Xbox One back to a respectable gaming brand, it would be hard to disagree with this argument. In fact it's BECAUSE of everything that's happened that makes the definition of "One place" all that more meaningful.
Some very tough lessons were learned here, chief among them is not forgetting that Xbox is first a gaming device. Sure all of these media applications are very important and quite honestly vital to what makes a mass market media device successful. But placing those apps and casual/social media nuances before gaming is where they erred. And watching Yusef Mehdi who was a brilliant marketing strategist during the XB360 era being reduced to faking vocal channel changing during the X1's 2013 reveal, and struggling to find a message for why gamers would want to invest tells us just how far they've come.
BUT(and it's a big BUTT) , here are all the ironies............and the truth bares out in all of it.
Digital downloading DID rise. So much that the brick and mortar chains are experiencing a fierce drop in foot traffic and engaged in mass store closings.
Single player campaigning while still extremely popular has indeed taken a backseat to multiplayer gaming.
Online connection is VITAL to gaming this generation. Being offline effectively lessons your experiences and the continued potency of your chosen gaming platform.
Media applications and social platforms are being fashioned and integrated into the consoles we game on.
Sony, Amazon, Apple, Google all either have or are in the process of building their own Netflixing type channels and networks to provide exclusive content for their subscribers now. When MS announced Xbox Entertainment 2013 it was treated as an anathema by gamers. MS just wanted their own "Game of Thrones" as I recall, and now so does everyone. I guess it took MS canceling their Entertainment division for it to become "cool"
Confusing isn't it? To arrive where MS wanted to originally take us. At least we don't have any Mattricks or Adam Orths to bring confusion. Everyone has stayed on message this time. Now all we need is for the birds of doom to keep their distance this time. Krom didn't keep his word last time, so we're all free to worship the gods of our choice. And if they don't work.............then the hell with them!!
We watched a Scorpio console get put together
Microsoft shows Digital Foundry how it's building the next Xbox.
By Richard Leadbetter Published 16/04/2017
The big surprise of my first Project Scorpio tech briefing? That's obvious: the fact that Microsoft has managed to push GPU frequencies all the way up to 1172MHz - far higher than anything we've seen from any current-gen console. When the silicon architects first revealed this spec point, I wondered how the hardware team had managed to achieve desktop PC-level GPU clocks in a console-sized form factor. "You've not seen the form-factor yet," replied Microsoft's Kevin Gammill wryly.
we've mentioned previously, this is a technique that hasn't been deployed on a console before - to the best of our knowledge, at least. It's called the 'Hovis method', named after the Microsoft engineer who devised the concept.
Project Scorpio extracts more efficiency by tailoring each individual motherboard to the power characteristics of the specific processor it is paired with, a process known internally as the 'Hovis Method' in honour of the engineer who came up with the concept.
"It's not new technology in that chips have differences in settings and things like that. What is really different is that this is almost like taking the chip to a dyno," Del Castillo says. "If you're familiar with cars, cars get tuned on a dyno. We tune everything at the motherboard level, rather than the component level. It takes into account a lot of variations in other parts that are sitting alongside those boards.
"Another analogy I would use is that you can buy a suit off the rack - a 44 regular or whatever size you are, or you can go to a tailor and have the suit fit specifically, right? That's kind of what we're talking about. That drives a much higher degree of efficiency into the system and allows us to get rid of a lot of wasted power that would otherwise come out as heat."
"It ties back into the craftsmanship of the whole thing," adds Francine Shammami, Xbox Senior Engineer. "We were really proud of this design... We put that craftsmanship into it from the inside out. Every single motherboard that comes off our line has this individually tuned voltage setting. We're really proud of it. It's something the team has being wanting to do for a few years. We're really excited to be doing it on Scorpio."
The motherboard attaches to the chassis, a drawn piece of steel that combines with a second part, forming a protective shield for the internals. These provide the backbone for the system in terms of its rigidity, but also protects the user from electromagnetic emissions. This part of the design should look very familiar to anyone who has dismantled a prior generation Xbox. With the motherboard attached to one of the steel surrounds, Leo begins to add in additional components. It starts with the hard drive. Microsoft promises a 50 per cent increase in bandwidth here, and that means cherry-picking drives that meet this specification.
"True 4K gaming was going to require a lot more data in the form of higher definition textures. One of the things we really worked for was to improve the performance of our mass storage system," he says, slotting the HDD into place - but there's something different here. The drive itself sits upon a more elaborate assembly than anything I've seen in a console before.
"No matter how good the part is, it's this integration with the rest of the system can make a lot of difference. One of the things that really hits its performance is vibration. Vibration is like the enemy of streaming speed. It raises error rates and creates latencies and makes the drive spin down. One of the things we do is we take the drive and we suspend it on elastomer dampers. Those absorb a lot of the energies that are borne through the chassis from other parts, like the fans, the optical drive spinning around."
The Scorpio cooling assembly is also innovative for the console space. It uses a vapour chamber heat sink, similar to the thermal solution in Nvidia's top-end graphics cards like GTX 1080 Ti and Titan Xp.
Leo points to a very small, almost irrelevant-looking plastic bracket next to the hard drive assembly. Immediate impressions are that this simply tidies away an already very short cable but its overall function is more important than you might think.
"Its purpose in life is to keep that cable pressed down and out of the way, because otherwise it might arc up and touch the chassis above it, again transferring vibration," he says. "These are all things we learned from building consoles for as long as we have. It's that attention to all these engineering details that makes sure that we get all the performance out of the components that we use and that the customer gets the best experience possible."
Keeping the system cool is the key challenge for Scorpio: the processor consumes more power than any single part in any previous Xbox and even with the innovative power management system, it still kicks out plenty of heat - as do the voltage regulators. Moving to GDDR5 over Xbox One's DDR3 also represents a big increase in power consumption. With these factors combined, more innovation is required in the new console's cooling assembly.
"We're really looking for the optimum solutions," Del Castillo confirms. "So one of the things that we've done is gone to a vapour chamber solution for our heat sink. Vapour chambers, basically it's a copper vessel that forms the base of the heat sink inside of which is deionised water under vacuum. Vacuum helps the boiling point of that water to be lower."
The cooling assembly is impressive - the heat sink has a low profile, and the entire base plate is constructed from copper. It covers a good proportion of the motherboard's right side, sitting atop the Scorpio Engine, the VRMs and the clamshell arrangement of GDDR5. The standard axial fan solution found in prior Xbox hardware wouldn't cut the mustard here, so Microsoft has paired the vapour chamber heat sink with a blower-style centrifugal fan, which Leo brings out and places on top of the heat sink.
Ducting here is extensive: cooler air comes from the sides, with hot air blown out the back. Aside from the cooling advantage, there's a user convenience angle too - you can place another box on top of the Scorpio console and it won't block the heat exhaust.
A look at Scorpio's centrifugal fan. Air is pulled in from the sides and expelled out of the back of the console. This means you should be able to stack other components above and below the Scorpio console.
"We went to a custom designed adapted centrifugal fan for this design. It kind of looks like a super-charger on a car, it looks like an intercooler almost," says Del Castillo. "Every part about this is custom designed for the application. The vapour chamber heat sink is configured, the design of the impellers and the ducts... we started off with computational fluid dynamics models. This is again part of the concurrent engineering approach we take even before we have final silicon designs and final motherboard designs."
Again, this is all created in parallel with other components in the system way before final parts are fabricated, to the point where initials models of the chassis are built with heaters in place of electrical components to simulate the cooling challenge ahead. What I didn't get to see was the cooling assembly in action - and fan noise has been an issue this generation, on PlayStation hardware especially. However, Del Castillo does explain how the algorithm for operating the fans works. There are 32 diodes on the SoC, required because the different power states for different elements of the chip cause varying degrees of heat generation across the die.
"We have 32 diodes on that die and we track them all the time, but for Scorpio we had to go to the next level," adds Andres Hernandez, Xbox Senior Electrical Engineer. "One of the things we did for that is track the power on the Scorpio Engine. That allows us to do very deterministic operations on the fan so we go figure out the Scorpio power and then we can determine the exact TJ temperature that we can run that chip at. So that's something that is really cool for Scorpio. Determining that TJ allows us to run the fan efficiently, so that's part of the algorithm that is new for Scorpio - and then we serialise all of these inputs into several PID controllers that end up controlling that fan speed."
Ducts on the cooling shroud cover the vapour chamber heatsink, but there's also another duct for the next component that slots into place - the internal power supply. This became a standard on Xbox One S and the positive reception from consumers ensured that it carried over to Scorpio. Del Castillo says that the new 245W unit is the most efficient power supply used by an Xbox console to date.
"With that we have just a few more pieces left," he continues, pulling out another box that slots into place within the Scorpio chassis. "So, Xbox One S today is the only game console that is capable of UHD Blu-ray playback, so the optical drive that we optimised for Xbox One S fairly fits this application. We made some small tweaks to the way it integrates with this chassis but other than that the drive is unchanged."
Here's how all of the internal Scorpio components slot into place. These are secured into the chassis, with the final retail plastics completing the console.
And with that, the collection of console internals is complete. Everything is tightly packed, there is no wasted space. Having dismantled a fair few Xbox consoles in the past, this level of integration is on another level compared to prior Microsoft boxes. The second half of the steel chassis slots into place, and Del Castillo points to a row of holes at the back of the unit. On the face of it, it's an incidental detail and yet even here, a lot of work has been poured into the manufacture of the unit.
"One of the things we needed to do was to find a way to punch large holes that would allow a large amount of air to pass through and look fairly transparent," he explains. "These holes are punched very, very close together - so close together that the webbing between the holes is thinner than the thickness of the material. Before we did this, if you asked any tooling engineer if this was possible they'd say no, it should not be done, it should not even be attempted. But our engineers took that as a challenge. So those are punched holes, punched in a metal press, not cut with a laser. They're perfectly straight and at a very high aspect ratio. All this attention to detail allows us to optimise our overall design and get all those pieces in there."
Finalising the construction are the WiFi and Xbox wireless radios, again derived from Xbox One S and moved on into Project Scorpio with improved iterations. Customisation was required to integrate with the new chassis, but the core specification remains unchanged - meaning that the 2x2 WiFi accommodates the 802.11ac dual-band standard at both 2.4GHz and 5GHz. And with that, an almost complete Project Scorpio unit sits in front of me, lacking only what Microsoft calls the ID - the final exterior plastics. All I'll say here is that when Microsoft reveals the box at E3, you should go in expecting surprises. Pleasant ones.
It's always interesting to see console teardowns once the likes of iFixit get hold of final retail consoles - but this presentation is unique in that I actually got to see the reverse: the unit was put together right in front of me with an outline of the engineering processes involved in the design. What's fascinating here is that while the technologies in play are state-of-the-art, there is still a simple elegance in the modularity of the design - and it's here where you can see similarities with prior Xbox designs.
The question of how Microsoft has managed to extract desktop GPU-like clock-speeds from a console SoC, and by extension, how the Xbox team has delivered six teraflops of GPU power, is now answered. The end result is a 43 per cent increase in raw compute compared to PS4 Pro, with a processor we estimate as being 12 to 16 per cent larger in terms of die size.
That's an impressive accomplishment and clearly, achieving it was far from easy. From my perspective, the only unknown is just how discrete and quiet the final hardware will be - and just how much additional cost the choice of components adds to the base price. In common with all the outstanding questions we have, this is a matter for E3 and we'll report back on that when we have more answers.
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really excited by this.....
The question of how Microsoft has managed to extract desktop GPU-like clock-speeds from a console SoC, and by extension, how the Xbox team has delivered six teraflops of GPU power, is now answered. The end result is a 43 per cent increase in raw compute compared to PS4 Pro, with a processor we estimate as being 12 to 16 per cent larger in terms of die area
I am excited as it means the gauntlet is now thrown down and SONY and MS now have a fair crack at the market share that they should have had in 2013.......It only means great games across both platforms and the 1st Party exclusives are going to be insane
The question of how Microsoft has managed to extract desktop GPU-like clock-speeds from a console SoC, and by extension, how the Xbox team has delivered six teraflops of GPU power, is now answered. The end result is a 43 per cent increase in raw compute compared to PS4 Pro, with a processor we estimate as being 12 to 16 per cent larger in terms of die area
I am excited as it means the gauntlet is now thrown down and SONY and MS now have a fair crack at the market share that they should have had in 2013.......It only means great games across both platforms and the 1st Party exclusives are going to be insane
Confirmed! The new Xbox shall be named Karen!
Does anyone else miss buying gaming magazines in regards to hardware launches? I still have EGM and Hyper from 20+ years ago, covering all the console reveals.
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