Xbox One X

Peter Crisp wrote:As I've never played any xbone games the ability to play all the games I've missed in an enhanced state is great news.
They will all be available via Boomerang so it should be pretty easy to get quite a lot of gaming right away.

more heat than light wrote:

Peter Crisp wrote:As I've never played any xbone games the ability to play all the games I've missed in an enhanced state is great news.
They will all be available via Boomerang so it should be pretty easy to get quite a lot of gaming right away.

If you were just looking to rent and play the older titles rather than keeping them, Xbox Game Pass could well be something worth looking into when it launches.

NickSCFC wrote:

KK wrote:Kind of odd how the PS3/Slim can play 98% of PlayStation 1 titles (including demo discs) but PS2 compatibility was all over the place.

I still don't understand why current-gen console's don't play CDs.

KK wrote:

NickSCFC wrote:

KK wrote:Kind of odd how the PS3/Slim can play 98% of PlayStation 1 titles (including demo discs) but PS2 compatibility was all over the place.

I still don't understand why current-gen console's don't play CDs.

I never knew that; which goes to show I haven't even tried.

Hime wrote:Could 360 games that run better on Xbox One run even better on Scorpio or are the improvements down to the emulator which will be the same on both*?


*I have no idea how this stuff works.

Garth wrote:Xbox One and Xbox 360 games running on Scorpio benefit from:

1. Smoother performance and no screen-tearing
2. Maximum possible resolution on dynamic titles
3. Improved texture filtering (16x anisotropic filtering)
4. Scorpio GameDVR support (up to 4K, 60fps, HDR, and the ability to select individual frames for screenshots)
5. Faster loading

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digit ... -be-better

This is zoomed in further into the scene to highlight the difference. AF at high settings means textures viewed at more extreme angles relative to the camera stay crisp. Many console games appear to have blurier textures than are actually stored in ram because of it.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread. ... t233470497

At Team Xbox we put gamers at the center of everything we do and we are driven to build the best platform on which to create and play games. We know that you can’t have one without the other, which is why we’ve invested so much in new development tools, publishing opportunities, hardware and services for developers and gamers alike. With Project Scorpio, we created a console with the goal of being the ultimate place for developers to realize their visions and the best place to play any Xbox game.

The creativity and innovation in our industry is driven by developers of all sizes. A single person can launch a game that becomes a global phenomenon or teams of hundreds can create the industry’s biggest blockbuster. At GDC in March, we announced the Xbox Live Creators program, opening up access for anyone to create and publish a game to Xbox One consoles and Windows 10 PCs. When you combine that program with dev mode, which enables any retail Xbox One to be a developer kit, you have the easiest path in the industry for game creators to publish their games broadly to console and PC, reaching millions of gamers around the world.

With Project Scorpio, we set a design goal of building the first true 4K console for gamers with an emphasis on compatibility so no one gets left behind. Once we locked that plan, we set our sights on building the world’s most powerful console development platform, which includes the new Xbox One Development Kit and a full suite of software to get every ounce of performance from the platform. Like the retail console, we built this special dev kit by evaluating every piece, from hardware to software and tools, with developers and compatibility in mind. We paid attention to logistical details, like dramatically speeding up how quickly a developer can move their work between PC and dev kit, and made it easy to program and test changes at the literal press of a button on the front of the box. The goal is to let creators focus their time and energy on bringing their game to life, and less of it on getting up and running on new hardware.

We’ve created the most powerful console with you in mind. We’ve created the most powerful development platform with our industry’s creators in mind. And, we’re unifying players across PC and console with Xbox Live, the fastest, most reliable multiplayer network and Beam, the next generation streaming service. Ultimately, we know you care most about great games, whether they be exclusive, multiplatform, independent or AAA. We are proud of the diverse lineup of games coming this year that will only be playable on Xbox One and will play better on Project Scorpio. We designed Project Scorpio to be the best console to play the blockbuster multiplatform games from our publishing partners, made it easy for recently released titles to upgrade to true 4K and for beloved, backward compatible titles to play better than ever before.

I’m proud of the progress made with Project Scorpio and what it will mean for the creators who fuel the passion of gamers around the world. On behalf of everyone at Team Xbox, thank you for your continued passion and support. We’re excited to unveil Project Scorpio and the amazing game experiences it powers at E3 this June.

Phil Spencer

NickSCFC wrote:

KK wrote:Kind of odd how the PS3/Slim can play 98% of PlayStation 1 titles (including demo discs) but PS2 compatibility was all over the place.

I still don't understand why current-gen console's don't play CDs.

Garth wrote:A bit about the VR plan from the Phil Spencer interview linked to above by Monkey Man:

In terms of hardware, we will talk more about it. There is a plan. I'll say that. This is not a we don't know what we're doing; it's more that we aren't saying yet. I think it's an immersive experience. I do not like that people are having to say, which of these VR verticals do I go pick right now, as a developer? Because I don't think any of them are really big enough yet to support a single experience. So you can see what we've done on console where we've said hey, go unlock your console and become a developer and go build a console game. You don't need to sign any kind of exclusivity deal with us in order to go unlock our console and go party on it. And build games.

So we're going to...my approach is to try and take a more open and inclusive approach to VR. The problem is the other people who are creating closed ecosystems are probably not going to like that. They're probably not going to want to play.

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.

"Typically for CPU, the top two items are frequency and memory latency. If the CPU has data, the faster it can process it, the quicker the result, but it also means that if it doesn't have the data, it sits there idle, so latency is a big component. On frequency, we pushed it up to 2.3GHz" explains Nick Baker "On the latency, a couple of the areas we tackled, one was all the queues coming back from the memory interface, we sped those up as well. Specifically, within the core, because we're running a virtualised OS environment, we wanted to optimise how memory translation operations happen so there are some key changes inside the core to speed those things up. The end result is that not only does the CPU run faster, it also runs more efficiently meaning more power for you at the end."

According to Goossen, some performance optimisations from the upcoming AMD Vega architecture factor into the Scorpio Engine's design, but other features that made it into PS4 Pro - for example, double-rate FP16 processing - do not. However, customisation was extensive elsewhere. Microsoft's GPU command processor implementation of DX12 has provided big wins for Xbox One developers, and it's set for expansion in Scorpio.

"We did multiple PIX captures from every single game and ran them on the emulator," Andrew Goossen, Technical Fellow, Graphics, tells us - a process that proved invaluable for validating Scorpio's back-compat capabilities. "We did over 30,000 emulator runs, which is a big contributor to Nick's total cycle count because we had to make sure that we were going to land with that 100 per cent compatibility [with Xbox One]."

But to what extent do those customisations elevate Scorpio beyond a PC equipped with a notional, baseline Radeon equivalent to Scorpio's GPU - no customisation but 'the same teraflops'. After the presentation, that's exactly what I asked Microsoft in the first of a couple of follow-up rounds of questions conducted over email.

"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," says Andrew Goossen. "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:

"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."

The design aims for the Project Scorpio can be distilled down into two very specific goals - both 900p and 1080p Xbox One titles need to scale up to native 4K. It's actually a significant extension of what Microsoft promised last year at E3, which specifically addressed running 1080p Xbox One titles at ultra HD. The scope is wider now - by targeting 900p Xbox One titles too, the implication is that the same kind of scalability is on the cards for PS4 1080p games as well.

"We wanted [native 1080p Xbox One games] to run at full native 4K with a rock-solid frame-rate with a whole bunch of performance left over to showcase and actually improve the visual experience in many other ways beyond render resolution," Andrew Goossen tells us. "And then our other goal was that we wanted to get 900p games up to full native 4K. That's a little bit harder. Some of 900p games - day one port - they should be running fine, solid at 2160p. For other games it's going to be more work than you'll traditionally do in terms of console optimisation but we wanted to get those 900p games at 2160p."

Those are the calculations the Xbox team made in formulating the design, but developers are free to use the power of the processor as they see fit.

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.

Monkey Man wrote:

Digital Foundry wrote: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.

jawafour wrote:

Monkey Man wrote:

Digital Foundry wrote: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.

Sounds cool... personally, I'm impressed with the build quality of the Xbox One S and I lilke the look of it, so if the Scorpio can build upon that then I'm keen to see more!

A listing for Microsoft’s Project Scorpio has been spotted on the Spanish Xtralife.es online store which lists the launch price of the console as 399.99 Euros (around US$430/£335). The listing has since been taken down but several users managed to take a screencap of it before it disappeared.

KK wrote:

A listing for Microsoft’s Project Scorpio has been spotted on the Spanish Xtralife.es online store which lists the launch price of the console as 399.99 Euros (around US$430/£335). The listing has since been taken down but several users managed to take a screencap of it before it disappeared.

https://www.onmsft.com/news/microsofts- ... y-retailer

So, if ultimately correct you'd be looking at £399 here too I think.

Death's Head wrote:

KK wrote:

A listing for Microsoft’s Project Scorpio has been spotted on the Spanish Xtralife.es online store which lists the launch price of the console as 399.99 Euros (around US$430/£335). The listing has since been taken down but several users managed to take a screencap of it before it disappeared.

https://www.onmsft.com/news/microsofts- ... y-retailer

So, if ultimately correct you'd be looking at £399 here too I think.

This is wrong, I said earlier in the topic it would be no more than £400, but HSH pointed out I was wrong.

Photek wrote:If it's €399 then it's not as niche as MS made out.