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Even better for gamers with a large library of existing Xbox One games, the full power of Scorpio can be "theoretically" be used to give older games a performance boost. While this doesn't mean that older games will suddenly run at 4K or 60FPS, games that had issues running smoothly the Xbox One are likely to run as intended on Scorpio.

"We've taken the approach that we do with 360 [games] on Xbox One," says Microsoft, "where you will never see a torn frame, because we have enough performance there to ensure that."

More bandwidth than a GTX 1080

At the heart of Project Scorpio is an all-new AMD GPU, which features 40 "customised" Radeon compute units (compared to just 12 on the Xbox One and Xbox One S) clocked at an impressive 1172MHz. That's a substantial increase over Xbox One GPU's 853MHz clock speeds, and even the PS4 Pro's 911MHz. Microsoft has doubled the amount of shader engines and render back-ends, and quadrupled the GPU L2 cache size, which it claims has boosted the GPU fill-rate by 2.7x. That's more than enough, it says, for native 4K gaming.

The new GPU—which still lives on the same 360mm-square die as the CPU—is paired with 12GB of GDDR5 memory, marking a move away from the DDR3/ESRAM pairing of the Xbox One towards the unified memory architecture favoured by Sony's PlayStation 4. In theory, latency will be higher compared to the Xbox One's ESRAM, but Microsoft says that "in terms of aggregate performance, the improved bandwidth and improved GPU performance means we don't hit any issues."

That memory is divided up into 12 1GB chips, each of which sports a 32-bit interface to create a 384-bit bus. In total, there's 326GB/s of memory bandwidth, which is substantially higher than the 204GB/s of the Xbox One and the 218GB/s of the PS4 Pro. Indeed, it's even higher than AMD's own RX 480, and higher than Nvidia's top-of-the-line GTX 1080.

While 12GB of memory sounds like a lot, developers will only have access to 8GB. The remaining 4GB will be dedicated to running the operating system, which Microsoft says is required to run the dashboard at a native 4K resolution. That's still 60 percent more memory than developers had access to in the past (the Xbox One reserved 3GB for the OS), which—when paired with the included 1TB hard drive with 50 percent more bandwidth—should ensure 4K games load as quickly as their HD counterparts according to Microsoft.

Naturally the CPU has been given a bump over the Xbox One too. It's still an 8-core, X86-based chip, but it now runs at 2.3GHz (compared to 1.75GHz in the Xbox One and 2.1GHz in the PS4 Pro). Unlike its predecessor, which used AMD's mobile-first "Jaguar" cores, Scorpio uses "custom" X86 cores, which are derived from Jaguar but heavily modified. Those expecting Ryzen may be disappointed, but Microsoft claims the customisation work it undertook with AMD has resulted in a noticeable performance increase.

"So, eight cores, organised as two clusters with a total of 4MB of L2 cache. These are unique customised CPUs for Scorpio running at 2.3GHz. Alluding back to the goals, we wanted to maintain 100 per cent backwards compatibility with Xbox One and Xbox One S while also pushing the performance envelope," Microsoft's Nick Baker told Digital Foundry.

Not just for 4K

While Scorpio's power is largely aimed at 4K gaming, there will be benefits for those with 1080p televisions. Supersampling—that is, rendering the game at 4K before downsampling to a lower resolution—will be supported. Microsoft has mandated to all developers that users should have the option of 4K rendering or better 1080p performance, and that all games should run at the same frame-rate or higher as on a standard Xbox One.

Dynamic resolution scaling is mooted for existing games like Doom, Halo 5, Gears of War 4, Battlefield 1, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and The Division.

Xbox Scorpio Xbox One S Xbox One PS4 Pro PS4 CPU 8 "custom" X86 cores @ 2.3GHz 8 Jaguar cores @ 1.75GHz 8 Jaguar cores @ 1.75GHz 8 Jaguar cores @ 2.1GHz 8 Jaguar cores @ 1.6GHz GPU 40 "customised" compute units @ 1172MHz 12 GCN compute units @ 914MHz 12 GCN compute units @ 853MHz 36 AMD Radeon GCN compute units @ 911Mhz 18 AMD Radeon GCN compute units @ 800Mhz Memory 12GB GDDR5 8GB DDR3/32MB ESRAM 8GB DDR3, 32MB ESRAM 8GB GDDR5 (plus 1GB DDR3) 8GB GDDR5 Memory Bandwidth 326GB/s 68GB/s, 219GB/s 68GB/s, 204GB/s 218GB/s 176GB/s Hard Drive 1TB 2.5-inch 1TB/500GB 2.5-inch 1TB/500GB 2.5-inch 1TB 2.5-inch 500GB 2.5-inch Optical Drive 4K UHD Blu-ray 4K UHD Blu-ray Blu-ray Blu-ray Blu-ray

To help developers get the most out of Scorpio, Microsoft has moved the GPU command processor—the hardware that takes instructions from the CPU and funnels them through to the graphics core—over to a DirectX 12-optimised solution. In theory, this will massively improve draw call performance on Scorpio, and cut down on CPU overheads.

"We essentially moved Direct3D 12," Microsoft told Digital Foundry. "We built that into the command processor of the GPU and what that means is that, for all the high frequency API invocations that the games do, they'll all natively implemented in the logic of the command processor—and what this means is that our communication from the game to the GPU is super-efficient."

Aside from the headline spec bumps, Scorpio has few other interesting additions. THere's a new "spacial surround" feature, which adds a height component to an existing 7.1 set-up, which sounds eerily similar to Dolby Atmos. The media encoding hardware block now supports the HEVC codec for 4K 60FPS recording in Xbox GameDVR, and there's a new retroactive screen capture feature that allows users to move through captures frame-by-frame to help take the best shot without precision timing.

But what does it look like?

Microsoft hasn't yet revealed what Scorpio looks like, other than to say that it's "trying to target a compact design." It has, however, revealed that it's using a vapour chamber heat sink to keep the combined CPU and GPU (APU) cool, similar to that employed by Nvidia in its Founders Edition graphics cards. Inside the heat sink is ionised distilled water kept under a vacuum. Heat is absorbed into the water, which turns into steam, which then condenses on the heat sink fins. That heat is then expelled by a "custom designed adapted centrifugal fan."

Those worried that Scorpio's extra horsepower would mark a return to the much maligned external power brick of the original Xbox One can rest easy—Scorpio will feature an internal 245W power supply, complete with the same figure-eight power socket as the Xbox One S. While there's naturally no Kinect port, the UHD Blu-ray drive returns, as does the HDMI input (yay?).

Scorpio's final form factor will be revealed at this year's E3.

No doubt a bunch of 4K games will too, but for now Microsoft has shown just one: Forza. In tech demo shown to Digital Foundry, Microsoft demonstrated how Scorpio is able to run the game at a native 4K resolution, and at a locked 60FPS. While the demo was "basically an Xbox One port," that GPU utilisation was at 60-70 percent while it was running is an impressive feat nonetheless.

As for how much Scorpio will cost, or when it will be released, all Microsoft has said for now is: "We are still a consumer product. We want to hit the price-points where consumers want to purchase this. It's about balancing the two." That said, given all the "premium" components inside Scorpio, I'd wager it's going to be pretty darn expensive. At least as expensive as the $499/£429 the Xbox One launched at, if not more.

For more on Scorpio, check out Digital Foundry's full report. There's a lot in there to get through, but it's well worth checking out if you're into the nitty gritty of console hardware—and there's even an explainer for those that aren't.

Kyle Orland and Sebastian Anthony contributed to this report.

Listing image by Microsoft