The same day the Microsoft acquired LinkedIn, the company announced today, at E3 in Los Angeles, that it would launch the long-rumored Project Scorpio which will see the Xbox One equipped with eight CPU cores and six teraflops of power in order to run 4K games natively while also offering virtual reality support.
Xbox One Scorpio will be the most powerful gaming console ever
While Microsoft has dropped $26 billion on its acquisition of LinkedIn, gamers won’t care as the company also unveiled its plans for the most powerful gaming console in history by pulling back the wool on its Xbox Project Scorpio. It’s promised that that system will work with all existing Xbox One games and peripherals as well as being integrated with Windows 10.
Phil Spencer announced the new console today at the E3 meeting in Los Angeles today stating that, “It’s a dramatic step up for us.”
Others, like The Verge, were well aware of its unveiling today prior to the fact and new that Microsoft was planning the VR supported console which will be “the most powerful console ever.”
“The important thing for Scorpio is that it’s a dramatic step up for us in terms of hardware capability,” he told The Verge in an exclusive interview last week. “Because as we saw 4K gaming and really high-end VR taking off in the PC space, we wanted to be able to bring that to console. Project Scorpio is actually an Xbox One that can natively run games in 4K and is built with the hardware capabilities to support the high-end VR that you see happening in the PC space today… when it ships it will be the most powerful console ever built.”
The games will remain the same just better with all that power and Scorpio, the newly announced Xbox One S and the “dinosaur” that is the Xbox one will all be able to play the same games and use the same accessories. Spencer pointed out that games like Halo 5 could run at 1080p and sixty frames a second, the Xbox One, in a nod to self-preservation, drops the resolution to run with a more solid framerate. This will not be the case with Scorpio according to Spencer who said, “When a game like that runs on Scorpio, it’s going to run at maximum resolution the whole time.”
Xbox Scorpio is on legal PEDs
The inclusion of VR support will have gamers going mad today. While it’s been long-rumored that Microsoft is working with Oculus the company continues to remain coy about that possibility, or other partnerships for that matter.
“We’re not ready to announce something right now, but you can imagine at the price point of Scorpio — which we haven’t actually said, but think about consoles and where they live in terms of price point — having something at six teraflops that will get millions of people buying it is very attractive to some of the VR companies that are out there already, and we’ve architected it such that something will be able to plug right in and work,” Spencer says.
Sony has publicly announced that it plans a massive upgrade to the PS4 including the launch of PlayStation VR later this year.
It’s, perhaps, for this reason that Microsoft is admittedly announcing something that remains quite a way’s away from release (holidays 2017?).
“It’s crazy to announce something this early,” said Spencer in the same interview with The Verge. “But when I put myself in the shoes of our customer, I want to be able to make a choice on what console I want to buy with as much information as possible. 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.”
When it’s released, “Project Scorpio will be the next addition to the Xbox One family, and it is ultimately the next step in delivering our vision of gaming beyond generations,” Spencer stated.
There comes a point that even then non-gamer (such as myself) gets excited about news like this and wonders if it’s not too late to don a VR headset, risk the health of my libido and simply start playing. Now that my girlfriend also works out of the same house, quite frankly, Joelle and I are spending far too much time together and falling into a VR world with a console capable of delivering this “shock and awe performance” could save our relationship through the absence that is rumored to “make the heart grow fonder.”
