Project Scorpio may be months from release, but we’ll get our first look at E3 this month. Read the latest rumours about the Xbox Scorpio specs, price and UK launch date.
Consoles are, historically, slightly odd. While tech manufacturers (and just about everybody else) provide yearly updates to their products to keep them up-to-date, console manufacturers do no such thing. Look at the Xbox 360 – apart from visual upgrades, the console remained largely unchanged in terms of tech throughout its eight-year cycle.
However, with the introduction of the likes of the PS4 Pro, Xbox One S and now Project Scorpio, console manufacturers are making more of an effort to keep consoles in line with their PC brethren.
Here, we discuss all we know about Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox Scorpio including release date and pricing rumours, and some of the key features that you can expect from the high-end console, including full specs .
Xbox One Scorpio expected release date: Christmas 2017
Xbox One Scorpio reveal date: 11 June 2017
While there’s no solid release date just yet, Microsoft’s Phil Spencer has hinted that it will be with us by Christmas 2017 (or “Holiday 2017” as our US counterparts call it) when explaining why the company decided to announce the project so early.
» It’s crazy to announce something this early, but when I put myself in the shoes of our customer, I want to be able to make a choice on what console I want to buy with as much information as possible, » Spencer said.
» We want to give you the information to make that decision. We also want to go talk to the developers that are out there today, that are building games for next holiday, and say here’s what you’re going to have at your disposal on the console side.»
Why would Spencer want to “ talk to developers […] that are building games for next holiday ” if the company had no plans for the console to be on the market by then? So, we’ ve got a broad 2017 release date.
Then, in February, Microsoft announced an event that’ll take place on Sunday June 11 at 2pm PT (10pm in the UK) where it’s likely that we’ll get our first look at the finished Xbox One Scorpio, including the final name, form factor, price, and release date.
While Microsoft didn’t initially confirm that Xbox Scorpio would be the topic of the E3 announcement, official invites to an Xbox-themed announcement were sent out in April.
As of March, the Microsoft Store features a Project Scorpio store page detailing the console’s six teraflops of graphical processing power and the offer of ‘true’ 4K gameplay. It doesn’t give much away beyond that apart from a ‘Holiday 2017’ release date, which ties in with everything we’ve said above.
Oh, and while there’s no price tag on the listing itself, there’s a price of $7,777,777 in the meta description of the page. Don’t start panicking though, as it’s only a placeholder — this probably isn’t a console for the world’s richest 1 percent!
Xbox One Scorpio estimated price: £400-550
But what about pricing? While there’s no confirmation of pricing just yet, Spencer hinted at it while speaking to The Verge.
» We’re not ready to announce something right now, but you can imagine at the price point of Scorpio – which we haven’t actually said, but think about consoles and where they live in terms of price point – having something at six teraflops that will get millions of people buying it is very attractive to some of the VR companies that are out there already, and we’ve architected it such that something will be able to plug right in and work .»
It’s not the only time Spencer has hinted at the high price point for the upcoming Xbox, as he also responded to a comment from analyst Michael Pachter who said it’d be «suicide» for the Scorpio to be priced at more than the PS4 Pro.
Speaking via Mexican website levelup.com, Spencer said that it’d be a «premium» console and that » we have not announced the pricing yet, but want to make sure that the investment we are making in the product of Scorpio goes hand in hand with the requirement of high-end consumers. And that means a higher price».
Those comments were later echoed by Microsoft’s Mike Ybarra, who told Eurogamer that Scorpio is designed for «that premium customer, the gamer that expects the absolute best versions of the games.»
However, while many assumed by these comments that the console would cost more than a standard console, Phil Spencer told AusGamers that the 4K system will launch at a «console price point».
The key for the Xbox team was to develop a console that delivered on the promise of 4K gaming without sacrificing the affordability of a console. » When you talk to me about Scorpio, the term I use about the architecture isn’ t the six teraflops which is obviously what we’ ve announced, it’s balance » Spencer explained.
» Really what it is, is you want a platform that is balanced between memory bandwidth, GPU power, you know, your ability to move memory and [an] amount of memory around in many ways is more inhibiting to the performance of your game than absolute teraflops on any one of the individual pieces, and when we designed Scorpio we really thought about this balanced rig that could come together at a price-point. Like, I want Scorpio to be at a console price-point, I’ m not trying to go and compete with a high-end rig. And because we’ re building one spec, we’ re able to look at the balance between all the components and make sure that it’s something we really hit that matters to consumers and gamers » he said.
Taking in the above rumours and comments, let’s assume that Project Scorpio will cost slightly more than standard consoles, and likely more than the £350 launch price of the PS4 Pro – that puts it at around the £400-550 mark.
It’s far from the competitive £249 price tag of the Xbox One S, but with native 4K output and VR capabilities at the very least, we’ re not too surprised about the high-end pricing.
We discussed the Scorpio’s specs and our expectations for the console on the UK Tech Weekly podcast:
In an almost unprecedented step for a modern console, Microsoft has fully revealed the Scorpio’s specs to Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry months ahead of the console’s release, so we know exactly what we have to look forward to.
First up, let’s talk CPU. The Scorpio boasts a custom-built eight-core CPU, with each core clocked at 2.3GHz. That’s similar to the octa-core setup in the PS4 Pro, but that only runs at 2.1GHz — and it’s miles ahead of the 1.75GHz CPU in the original Xbox One.
That’s an exciting step up, and it’s needed to drive the biggest hardware change here: the GPU. The entirely custom AMD chip boasts 40 compute units each running at 1172MHz — dramatically faster than the 911MHz the PS4 can manage across its 36 units. Microsoft has lived up to its promise to offer six teraflops of GPU power.
That’s all with the aim of running smooth, consistent 4K, which requires plenty of bandwidth elsewhere. To that end, the Scorpio has 12GB of GDDR5 (versus 8GB in the PS4 Pro) , with a total memory bandwidth of 326GB/s (218GB/s on the PS4 Pro) . 4GB of that is reserved for the system, but 8GB remains dedicated to games.
It also boasts a 1TB hard drive by default, again with improved bandwidth to help keep load times light. There’s also one of the latest AMD media blocks, to let players capture game content in full 4K with HDR, and an Ultra HD Blu-ray drive.
All of that extra power means extra heat, and the Scorpio has opted for a console cooling first: in line with high-end PC graphics chips like the GTX 1080, the Scorpio boasts a vapour chamber heat sink, which in turn required a custom fan — all in the name of packing in enough cooling to run the high-power console in a compact form factor.
What’s clear from across these specs is that not only does the Scorpio improve on the original Xbox One S in almost every regard, it also exceeds the specifications of the PS4 Pro in just about every area. Whatever else you say about it, this does indeed look like the most powerful console on the market — by a comfortable margin.
What we haven’t had a good look at yet is how all that extra power translates into performance. Even Digital Foundry’s reveal didn’t include any gameplay — just a tech demo of Forza, but that alone is enough to impress us so far.
ForzaTech ran at 60 frames per second in 4K (including full 4K assets) , including the maximum number of cars and the full A. I. and physics simulations — and it still only pushed the Scorpio GPU to 66 percent capacity.
Of course, this is a single first-party demo, perfectly optimised, but it shows off one of Microsoft’s major goals for the Scorpio: to produce native 4K at 60fps with overhead to spare.
