Xbox Scorpio – Most powerful Console Ever?

Let’s get one thing straight, despite all the promises Microsoft and Sony make, their consoles have yet to surpass a high-end PC particularly one with a GTX 1080 or even a 1070 or 980 Ti. Most games run at 900p which makes a significant difference from 1080p and especially 4K. But that doesn’t make much of a difference because most people who buy consoles simply want to use it to play FIFA while they are slumped on a couch but, just ask yourselves whether there was a console that could deliver the same raw power as an $800 PC.

Enter the new Xbox Scorpio scheduled to be released around holiday 2017. A console with a 6 teraflop GPU (1 teraflop = 1 trillion floating point operations per second), 320 GB/s memory bandwidth. Compare this with the new GTX 1070 with 6.5 TFlops or the new Playstation Neo with just 4.14 TFLOPS and memory bandwidth of 218GB/s. The 320 GB/s of the Scorpio is interesting because it is the same as that of the new GTX 1080, hence more graphical fidelity for console games. It’s still unknown whether the memory type will be GDDR5 or the new GDDR5X used by GPUs like the GTX 1080 but if the latter is true then Microsoft new console is already on its way to beat its competition by a huge margin.

There is no confirmation on whether the new Scorpio will support VR like the PSVR but if it does, which it most likely will because more and more games are adding VR support including notable AAA games like Fallout 4, then it will add even more value. Both Neo and Scorpio will have 8 core processor with Neo having a 2.1 GHz clock speed while that of Scorpio is still unconfirmed. It’s also unconfirmed as to who will be making the new processor for Scorpio, AMD is making the processor for Neo and will most likely be making for Microsoft as well.

Judging from the specs it seems that VR and 4K seem to be the main focus of both the Neo and Scorpio, especially 4K since 4K TVs are becoming a standard for buyers looking to invest in high-end equipment. The price is still unconfirmed and that’s where it will make all the difference because it is going to be a high-end console and we don’t know whether Microsoft would want all of its player-base and console owners to have this instead of the Xbox One even though they have made it clear there won’t be any exclusives for the Scorpio and any game on the Scorpio will be available to the Xbox One and vice versa.

This is a very interesting time for gaming as the console market is desperate to catch-up with its PC counterpart in terms of performance so it will be interesting to see how the Scorpio specs change in the upcoming months and how it will affect the console market. There is still no confirmation on the price from Microsoft so that is something we are still eagerly waiting for.