Microsoft confirms Project Scorpio, promises 4K gaming

While the Xbox One S will be taking on 4K Blu-Ray and video streaming this year, Microsoft has something much bigger planned for 2017. Today at the end of its E3 press conference, Microsoft officially announced Project Scorpio, a more powerful Xbox, which comes with a new CPU and a much more powerful GPU with 6TFLOPS of compute power, aiming to bring 4K gaming to consoles.

Project Scorpio will once again feature an eight-core CPU, but the real star of the show seems to be the new GPU, which Phil Spencer claims will deliver a “premier console gaming experience” capable of driving “true 4K gaming and high fidelity VR”.

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Project Scorpio will join the current Xbox line-up and be compatible with all Xbox One games and accessories. On the flip side, future Xbox games will also run on both consoles to ensure that nobody gets left behind.

Microsoft was keen to push its 6TFLOPS of compute performance, which at first glance rivals even that of the GTX 980Ti, according to this chart from PCPer. However, there is more to GPU performance than the amount of teraflops it can push so it's hard to make any real performance estimates based on that number alone.

Microsoft still has a year or so to keep developing its hardware though, so by the end of next year, we may have our first 4K gaming capable console, though developers will probably continue having to stick to 30 frames per second. Either way, we will find out more closer to the time when more developers start working on games for the new hardware.

KitGuru Says: Microsoft's Project Scorpio won't be coming until late 2017 and right now, we really don't know a lot about the hardware or its true capabilities aside from the amount of teraflops it can push. However, the focus on delivering 4K gaming is exciting, particularly in the console space. 

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