True 4K gaming is on the way from Microsoft sometime before the holiday season with the company’s Project Scorpio and the Xbox chief; Phil Spencer is confident that everything is going swimmingly roughly a year ahead of its release. Following a day-long meeting on Project Scorpio this week, Spencer was acting like a kid in a candy store when speaking of his most recent progress report.
True 4K gaming with Project Scorpio on the way from Microsoft with Sony lagging just behind?
Roughly a month ago the PlayStation 4 Pro was announced by Sony and it’s a powerful machine with about three times the power of the Playstation 4 and boasting a mammoth 4.2 Teraflops of power for computations. Mark Cerny, the man behind the system, did, however, reveal that Sony will not be providing 4K support to all games when the PlayStation 4 Pro goes on sale next month. While he did point out that true 4K was beyond the consoles power, he promised “near-4K gaming experience.”
Microsoft’s Project Scorpio, however, will offer the “most powerful console ever” as well as the “first and only console to enable true 4K gaming.” This statement is attributable to the fact that Project Scorpio’s six Teraflops of computational power which is, of course, 33% more powerful than the Playstation Pro 4. Shy of that the two machines are near identical with the same AMD processor, the same amount of GPU cores and each machine will play the same third party games.
What Sony will enjoy is the fact that it will be launching the Playstation Pro 4 well before Project Scorpio hits the market.
Microsoft doesn’t mind waiting to get 4K gaming right
When asked if all was on schedule, Spencer took to Twitter to say, “I’m in a day-long review of where the team is on Scorpio right now. Amazing progress and we are feeling good about schedule.”
Earlier this month, Spencer used an interview with GameSpot to tell the site that things were going “really well” and even suggested that the company was ahead of schedule.
“There is a lot of time to go, but we feel good about how the things are coming together,” he said. “The teams understand the performance spec that we’re building. We went through some of the high-level specs at E3 in the video. And it gives the teams time to make sure that they’re targeting that performance for their games.”
That wasn’t enough for Spencer as he clearly wanted to speak even more highly of his team and the job they are doing.
“So it’s not hard for us to say, ‘Okay this is the PC spec that you can expect with what we’re building on Scorpio,’ so it allows them to make sure they have the assets and capability to deliver. Since we’re focusing on a box that can support true 4K and a 4K frame buffer and a lot of PC games already support that; it’s not a new language or asset base for them in terms of things that we’re asking them to go do. I’m also pretty confident in the content lineup that we’ll see.”
Microsoft has launched the Xbox One S, but it won’t hold a candle to the Playstation 4 Pro. Project Scorpio, on the other hand, might just blow it away. It’s certainly in the realm of possibilities that the promise of the Scorpio’s true 4K experience could slow Sony sales but its more likely that the serious gamer will buy one of each.
While Microsoft has declined to talk about a specific price point yet, it won’t be cheap, but it shouldn’t exceed $600 which is the highest a gaming console has ever gone.
