Xbox Scorpio Dev Kits coming with A SPEC BUMP over Retail Scorpio with 44 Radeon Customized Compute Units

[AlTech]

Update. It appears Microsoft opted for the dev kit to feature 10% more CUs for a total of 2816 Stream Processors vs 2560 of the Retail unit.

 

Microsoft has revealed a Xbox Scorpio Dev Kit which features 6.6 Tflops of performance (roughly 10% faster than Retail Scorpio) and has 2x the VRAM at 24GB alongside a 1TB SSD.

 

The company has claimed that these spec increases are too allow for developers to easily port or create games which are both compatible with Xbox One and Scorpio.

 

Quote

To accommodate developers, Project Scorpio will have a few additional compute units granting it 6.6 TFLOPS vs. the consumer version's 6.0. The dev kit also has double the GDDR5 RAM to hit 24GB, complete with an additional 1TB SSD for rapid deployment. Microsoft says that the additional GPU power is to help developers optimize their games downwards, rather than upwards. The whole idea is to help developers hit native 4K, with 4K textures, with HDR, wide color gamut, and Dolby Atmos spatial audio.

 

 

 

This is kind of weird... I wasn't expecting a beefed up scorpio at all for devs. I can only imagine that the developer version has a higher clockspeed or a slightly larger GPU for this initial dev kit production run.

 

http://www.windowscentral.com/xboxs-project-scorpio-dev-kit-has-been-unveiled

 

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/295800/Inside_the_next_Xbox_Project_Scorpio_and_its_brandnew_dev_kit.php

[S w a t s o n]

Not sure I follow their logic of how this will help them optimize downwards but it's a cool idea. The GPU is probably OC'd rather than a larger die for that 10% increase.

[Mr.Meerkat]

Scuse me? What are you on Microsoft?  

[AlTech]

Just now, Mr.Meerkat said:

Scuse me? What are you on Microsoft?  

It's a little thing called AyyyMD .

 

Well, in this case the Developer kit might be worth the price. Traditionally dev kits have cost upwards of 2x the amount that consumers paid for the final product.

[Mr.Meerkat]

Just now, AluminiumTech said:

It's a little thing called AyyyMD .

 

Well, in this case the Developer kit might be worth the price. Traditionally dev kits have cost upwards of 2x the amount that consumers paid for the final product.

How does AyyyyyyyyMD have anything to do with this? 

 

Tru plus hey, this also gives people a reason to actually try to get a dev kit into their hands...

[dalekphalm]

So... They should sell this, at Retail, for a premium price (Say an extra $150 or $200 over the regular version).

 

People would definitely pay more to get the extra CU's and the 1TB SSD.

[DocSwag]

Because having something faster than what's retailing will make the games that actual run on Scorpio better... WTF is this logic?!?

[AlTech]

2 minutes ago, Mr.Meerkat said:

How does AyyyyyyyyMD have anything to do with this? 

They could have found a way to put 24GB VRAM on the PCB......

idk lol

2 minutes ago, Mr.Meerkat said:

Tru plus hey, this also gives people a reason to actually try to get a dev kit into their hands...

Too much money.... No, my wallet isn't ready.

 

3 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

So... They should sell this, at Retail, for a premium price (Say an extra $150 or $200 over the regular version).

 

People would definitely pay more to get the extra CU's and the 1TB SSD.

I doubt there's more CUs. It's probably just overclocked  and I'm not sure it would sell $200 extra with a 1TB SSD (Unless we're talking a really shitty mediocre SSSD).

[dalekphalm]

1 minute ago, AluminiumTech said:

They could have found a way to put 24GB VRAM on the PCB......

idk lol

Too much money.... No, my wallet isn't ready.

 

I doubt there's more CUs. It's probably just overclocked  and I'm not sure it would sell $200 extra with a 1TB SSD (Unless we're talking a really shitty mediocre SSSD).

To Quote... well... you:

Quote

To accommodate developers, Project Scorpio will have a few additional compute units 

So yeah - they could just OC the chip a little. But you yourself quote the source as saying it has additional CU's, not a clock boost.

[alamox]

well a 10% overclock to the gpu, i still think 4k is the wrong focus here, i would rather play a rich detailed game like the witcher 3 @ 1080p, than  the witcher 1 @ 4k.

xbone is dead, trying to hang on to it by making scorpio an extention rather than a standalone console with it's own exclusives, will bite them in the arse, it's just not that appealing.

i might be wrong, we will see anyway.

[dalekphalm]

2 minutes ago, alamox said:

well a 10% overclock to the gpu, i still think 4k is the wrong focus here, i would rather play a rich detailed game like the witcher 3 @ 1080p, than  the witcher 1 @ 4k.

xbone is dead, trying to hang on to it by making scorpio an extention rather than a standalone console with it's own exclusives, will bite them in the arse, it's just not that appealing.

i might be wrong, we will see anyway.

If you think XBOX is dead, that's incredibly naive. Is it behind in sales over PS4? Yeah. But it's still selling dozens of millions of consoles. They're doing quite well for themselves.

 

That would be like claiming iOS is a failure and is dead because it has a lower market share over Android.

 

The reason why they're optimizing for 4K instead of higher detail at 1080p is simple:

1. 4K TV's are finally becoming very mainstream - you can even pick up pretty good TV's for very cheap now

2. It's easier to market - a LOT easier - You tell the audience it's higher resolution and more detail. Explaining a lower res but higher quality settings experience to non-techs is pretty futile - very difficult to get that across properly in marketing.

3. 4K + HDR is pretty awesome, and even if they use some form of upscaling in some of the titles, it can still look and play very good.

 

Personally, I hope that the console has intelligent quality options (or the ability to straight up choose) that will switch between:

4K @ 60 Hz w/ lower graphics detail

4K @ 30 Hz w/ higher graphics detail

1080p @ 60 Hz w/ highest graphics detail

 

If I can choose between those options, then I have no problem at all with 4K being the primary focus.

[AlTech]

11 minutes ago, alamox said:

well a 10% overclock to the gpu, i still think 4k is the wrong focus here, i would rather play a rich detailed game like the witcher 3 @ 1080p, than  the witcher 1 @ 4k.

xbone is dead, trying to hang on to it by making scorpio an extention rather than a standalone console with it's own exclusives, will bite them in the arse, it's just not that appealing.

i might be wrong, we will see anyway.

Microsoft has made sure that devs understand that they will need to allow users to choose either the 4K option either targeting the game at 30fps or 60fps OR 1080p 60fps.

[Stefan1024]

More RAM is great durng development, so you can run it on the console while it is not fully optimized yet.

 

But I hope they have a switch to limit the HW to the consumer version.

 

If you try to get a dev version: the additional RAM and CUs are worthless as the game probably coded to not use it. And the few % OC don't make a difference.

[nSkaarup]

The Scorpio should be shipping with AMD Freesync, and apparently Microsoft is gonna try to get TV manufacturers to implement it in TVs

 

Gamasutra post with the specs of Scorpio

[Mr.Meerkat]

17 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

4K TV's are finally becoming very mainstream - you can even pick up pretty good TV's for very cheap now

Deffo true when 4K TVs can be bought as cheap as cheaper 1080p TVs now ...

 

6 minutes ago, Stefan1024 said:

More RAM is great durng development, so you can run it on the console while it is not fully optimized yet.

 

But I hope they have a switch to limit the HW to the consumer version.

Indie dev forgets that the dev kit is more powerful, wonders why everyone is complaining about slightly poor performance  

[Princess Luna]

15 minutes ago, Mr.Meerkat said:

Indie dev forgets that the dev kit is more powerful, wonders why everyone is complaining about slightly poor performance

For what is worth the dev version should be inferior, so they have to optimize it the most to run on it and then go butter smooth in the retail version [:

[Mr.Meerkat]

16 minutes ago, Princess Cadence said:

For what is worth the dev version should be inferior, so they have to optimize it the most to run on it and then go butter smooth in the retail version [:

But...they could also have optimised it to the dev version instead of the actual console...

It's possible...

[JAKEBAB]

Wow people really know nothing about dev kits, its normal for a devkit to have higher spec than the consumer grade, they have to run debug tools aswell as the game. Just look at the 360 and ps3 devkits.

[S w a t s o n]

15 minutes ago, JAKEBAB said:

Wow people really know nothing about dev kits, its normal for a devkit to have higher spec than the consumer grade, they have to run debug tools aswell as the game. Just look at the 360 and ps3 devkits.

I doubt the dev tools require TWICE the vram and a gpu spec bump, it would be mostly bound to the cpu unless they are rendering something complex using those dev tools?

As for the additional CU's I wonder if they are just guessing or if they really confirmed it has 10% more CU's, seems like an expensive and odd choice

 

Edit: Nvm the original gamasutra article that this article refrences, explicitly states it's 44 CU's vs the original 40 clocked at the same clock speed.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/295800/Inside_the_next_Xbox_Project_Scorpio_and_its_brandnew_dev_kit.php

[Gikero]

5 minutes ago, Swatson said:

I doubt the dev tools require TWICE the vram and a gpu spec bump, it would be mostly bound to the cpu unless they are rendering something complex using those dev tools?

The original Xbox had 64MBs of RAM in commercial versions. Dev kits had 128MB. With a little software modding and soldering, a version 1.0 of the Xbox could utilize the extra RAM in homebrew. Xbox 360 dev kits were rumored to be 1GB when the original was 512MB of RAM.

[Mira Yurizaki]

So their idea of optimizing is "throw everything maximum and tone it down" rather than "start with the bare minimum and add to it"?

 

I feel confused here.

[alamox]

1 hour ago, AluminiumTech said:

Microsoft has made sure that devs understand that they will need to allow users to choose either the 4K option either targeting the game at 30fps or 60fps OR 1080p 60fps.

that is excatly my point, why does microsoft cling into a dead console, that would bring the quality of the games down for the common denominator ( xbone ).

game made from the ground up for 6 TeraFlops are completely different from games made for 2TeraFlops, then supersampled to 4k.

 

1 hour ago, dalekphalm said:

If you think XBOX is dead, that's incredibly naive. Is it behind in sales over PS4? Yeah. But it's still selling dozens of millions of consoles. They're doing quite well for themselves.

 

That would be like claiming iOS is a failure and is dead because it has a lower market share over Android.

 

The reason why they're optimizing for 4K instead of higher detail at 1080p is simple:

1. 4K TV's are finally becoming very mainstream - you can even pick up pretty good TV's for very cheap now

2. It's easier to market - a LOT easier - You tell the audience it's higher resolution and more detail. Explaining a lower res but higher quality settings experience to non-techs is pretty futile - very difficult to get that across properly in marketing.

3. 4K + HDR is pretty awesome, and even if they use some form of upscaling in some of the titles, it can still look and play very good.

 

Personally, I hope that the console has intelligent quality options (or the ability to straight up choose) that will switch between:

4K @ 60 Hz w/ lower graphics detail

4K @ 30 Hz w/ higher graphics detail

1080p @ 60 Hz w/ highest graphics detail

 

If I can choose between those options, then I have no problem at all with 4K being the primary focus.

dozens of millios is a bit of a strech they barely broke 25million units, that is a couple dozen, it's not yet plural untill you get quantity of 3 dozen..., ps4 is closing in on 60 millions units, and the games line up and exclusivity paints rather a clear picture.

the increase in compute does barely allow 4k, and it is a marketing tool, contrary to say " detail rich games", the bump from xbone to scorpio performance although it allow the 1080p content to be run at 4k, it does that with details downgrade in favor of pixel count, which brings me to my point, the overall game will be more empty than any usual 1080p game could allow, and far less fps count.

i do wanna ask you a question, on PC would you pick an HDR 144hz 1080p monitor ? or an SDR 144hz 4k ?

and explain to me why, thx.

[IceCold008]

Im really looking forward to see Scorpio in action tbh. I myself have a Panasonic 4K 3D TV which ive never gamed on before. I have my PC for that.  It would be interesting if they could keep games at 4k at 60 fps. Might be worth checking out. But like anything in this day and age its all about having time. 

[S w a t s o n]

18 minutes ago, Gikero said:

The original Xbox had 64MBs of RAM in commercial versions. Dev kits had 128MB. With a little software modding and soldering, a version 1.0 of the Xbox could utilize the extra RAM in homebrew. Xbox 360 dev kits were rumored to be 1GB when the original was 512MB of RAM.

True but we're talking about different scales. I can totally see them needing an extra 64MB or an extra 512MB, but an extra 12GB?

[ashypanda]

it would have made more sense if the dev kits were less powerful, as at least then you can guarantee that the retail units will have native 4K, with HDR, as now they are going to have to gimp the games just to get them to run on the retail unit.