Updated, April 2017: The actual hardware specs of Xbox One Scorpio have now been revealed.

While Project Scorpio was no secret before this year's E3, it's safe to say that few expected Microsoft to announce it alongside the slimmed down Xbox One S. Fewer still expected the company to one-up the recently confirmed PlayStation Neo. If the leaked Neo specs are to be believed—and several developers have confirmed the specs to multiple publications, including Ars Technica—Microsoft's Project Scorpio is set to be around 40 percent faster, a reversal of the performance difference between the current Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

It's safe to say that Microsoft was growing tired of all those 1080p resolution memes.

And so gamers have been promised a console for release in 2017 that packs a whopping 6 teraflops of processing power (compared to the current Xbox One's mere 1.31), along with a much improved 320GB/s of memory bandwidth. Even ignoring some of Microsoft's more questionable claims (uncompressed pixels anyone?), those are some impressive specs. Forget 1080p/60fps: Microsoft says that this system is more than enough hardware to push a VR headset (the company isn't saying which one yet, but I'd bet on Oculus), and run regular games at 4K resolution with support for High Dynamic Range (HDR).

As powerful as the Project Scorpio hardware is, 4K is an ambitious goal. While we don't know the ins and outs of the actual hardware just yet, Microsoft's E3 showcase gave us enough to make a few educated guesses—and the big one is that native 4K is going to be a stretch, at least without some sacrifices to rendering quality. Compare that 6 teraflops figure to existing graphics cards for the PC, and it doesn't bode well. AMD's R9 390X pushes around 5.9 teraflops, but the card struggles with 4K at 30fps. Even a top-tier R9 Fury X (8.4 teraflops), or an Nvidia GTX 1080 (9 teraflops), just barely scrape by.

Yes, low-level graphics APIs, light operating systems, and consistent hardware targets mean developers are able to extract more performance from consoles than from equivalent PC hardware. And if this year's E3 is anything to go by, there's a lot that developers can do, even with the existing hardware—just look at the gameplay footage from the likes of Forza Horizon 3, or God of War. But that's a huge performance difference to make up with optimisation, and right now it's difficult to see how Microsoft hopes to achieve its 4K goals unless there's some upscaling magic at work instead of native 4K rendering.

The PlayStation Neo has it even harder. Leaked specs put its performance at somewhere around 4.2 teraflops, while its 36 GCN compute units clocked at 911MHz strongly suggest it's using a form of AMD's upcoming Polaris architecture, most likely a down-clocked RX 480. Memory bandwidth is up compared to the PS4 at 218GB/s but far behind that of Scorpio. At this stage, those specs are unlikely to change, particularly as developer kits have already gone out to developers. A radical redesign to match Scorpio's GPU—which, given what we know about AMD's GPU lineup and the cooling setup in Project Scorpio, is likely to be a down-clocked version of Vega rather than an overlocked Polaris—is pretty much off the table.

There's not going to be much help on the CPU side for Scorpio or Neo, either. Neo is said to sport the same Jaguar-based 8-core CPU as the current PS4, albeit with a healthy 500MHz boost in clock speed. Scorpio will have an as yet unspecified 8-core CPU, but given how little time was spent talking about it—not to mention that AMD's new Zen architecture is launching as a high-powered desktop part rather than the laptop chip the consoles use—it's probably Jaguar-based, too.

None of this is to say that Scorpio won't be an impressive piece of hardware or that it won't do 4K at all, but consumers should have realistic expectations. The hype train is always strong at E3, particularly where hardware is concerned, and I simply wouldn't expect Scorpio to be the all-singing, all-dancing 4K monster machine that console gamers can use to stick it to their PC-gaming friends. From what we know right now, the hardware specs simply don't support that level of performance.

That's not to mention that, if Microsoft is going with Vega, Scorpio is going to be a very expensive machine indeed.