Microsoft reveals Project Scorpio hardware specifications

Another slow news day so we'll cover a bit of console news! Microsoft gave Digital Foundry an exclusive look at the upcoming "Project Scorpio" and allowed the site to share details about the specifications of the new Xbox console. It's a rather bold move from Microsoft as Digital Foundry was one of the harshest critics of Project Scorpio.

Anyway, Microsoft revealed the Project Scorpio console will feature a new AMD processor with eight custom x86 cores clocked at 2.3GHz and a custom GPU based on the AMD Polaris design. The GPU will feature 40 CUs clocked at 1172MHz, 12GB GDDR5 memory and a memory bandwidth of 326GB/s. All this results in Microsoft hitting the 6 teraflop performance target it set for the GPU. Other specifications of the console include a 1TB 2.5" HDD and a 4K UHD Blu-ray disk drive.

For a more technical look at the console you can check out the full article at Digital Foundry. Microsoft says they've made many console optimizations to the hardware and showed Forza Motorsport 6 running at a 4K resolution with 60fps.

The demo stacks up the maximum amount of cars and runs the full AI and physics simulations. It's a highly taxing stress test, used to enforce the strict budgets in Forza Motorsport to ensure the locked 60fps the series is famous for. The ForzaTech port to Scorpio took two days to complete and was fully performant from day one. In fact, the team can push ForzaTech to the equivalent of PC's ultra-level settings and we're still sitting at 88 per cent GPU utilisation; in terms of system utilisation, this is ballpark with Xbox One at 1080p on its default settings. Clearly this is just one game, but the point is that Scorpio doesn't just scale Xbox One engines to 4K. For the Forza engine at least, there's overhead, and plenty of it.