While Sony has had the jump on Microsoft by up to a year with the recent release of the PlayStation 4 Pro, the latter’s forthcoming Xbox One upgrade, codenamed Scorpio, is expected to beat out its rival in terms of power when it is released next year. The Scorpio, which packs in 6 TFLOPS of computing power, will have a “significant advantage” over the PS4 Pro, according to Mark Williams, Technical Director at VooFoo Studios, developer of Mantis Burn Racing.
“It has generally been more difficult to reach 60fps on Xbox One than on PS4, so Scorpio will be a very welcome change,” Williams told GamingBolt. “I’ve yet to see the functional differences in the Scorpio GPU, so it remains to be seen how much of a difference there will actually be, but Scorpio definitely has a significant advantage in terms of memory bandwidth, so we’ll definitely be seeing higher fidelity games on there.”
Williams also claimed that, while the Scorpio will be slightly hamstrung by the fact that it will only be able to run standard Xbox One-compatible games, comparing the graphical output as being akin to the same game running on different PC graphics cards.
“Yes, definitely,” he added. “We have to maintain parity from a functional and gameplay point of view, but we can really go to town on ramping up the visual quality. It’s like having a PC game where you get a new graphics card and now you can ramp all the graphics settings up to maximum – it’s the same game, but it looks a hell of a lot nicer.”
Recent reports suggest that the Scorpio will be out in time for Christmas 2017. Xbox head Phil Spencer said: “We want to give you the information to make that decision. We also want to go talk to the developers that are out there today, that are building games for next holiday, and say here’s what you’re going to have at your disposal on the console side.”
Since the news that HDMI 2 at 4K only supports 4:2:2 encoding with HDR, and that all games on Scorpio will be HDR, the resolution advantage of 4K over PS4 Pro’s checkerboard rendering and the like goes away – in effect native 4K HDR loses half of the horizontal chroma encoding information (1920x2060p colour, 4K luma) anyway.
I don’t know if it is possible for game renderers to optimise for this – a 4K luma scan and a chroma scan at half the resolution.
So screenshots will not represent what you see on screen with Scorpio or PS4 Pro in HDR 4K. This is going to be a big argument down the line.
Scorpio can avoid this. It could include a DisplayPort output. Many TVs these days have a DisplayPort input, and it would bypass the entire issue, and be a massive marketing point.
4k p30 4:4;4 16bit is fine… lets be hoenst they aren’t going to be hitting 4kp60 on the scorpio in many games..
or 4kp60 8bit would also work on hdmi 2.
I think most poeple with a 4k TV from 2015/2016 are going to have all sorts of HDMi bandwidth issues anyway as the TV manufacturers have played pretty hard and loose with the specs accross the ports even putting unsupported crap in the edid for fun.