Microsoft Xbox Scorpio whitepaper leaks

Posted on Wednesday, January 25 2017 @ 16:20 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
One more post before we start thinking about dinner. Digital Foundry got its hands on a leaked whitepaper that reveals lots of details about the upcoming Xbox Project Scorpio console from Microsoft. Among other things, it reveals the new console will not have ESRAM and while a bit more speculative, it appears it will use pre-Zen AMD CPU cores.
The most interesting change is what’s missing: the small, on-chip RAM (ESRAM). Microsoft claims that the higher global memory bandwidth removes the need to have it on Project Scorpio.

Digital Foundry is still a bit concerned that, while the 320 GB/s bandwidth might be enough, the latency might be a concern for compatibility. Personally, I’m not too concerned. Modern GPUs do a huge amount of latency-hiding tricks, such as parking whole shaders at global memory accesses and running other tasks while the GPU fetches the memory the original shader needs, swapping it back and finishing when it arrives. Also, the increased GPU performance will mean that the game has more room to be wasteful of GPU resources, since it only needs to perform at least as good as a regular Xbox One. I expect that there wouldn’t be enough round-trips to ESRAM for it to be a major slowdown when running on Project Scorpio (and its not-ESRAM).


Via: PC Perspective


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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