The mandate for making the Xbox One Scorpio was to create powerful hardware that developers find it easy to work with- and it looks like Microsoft achieved their goals. For instance, Turn 10, the folks behind the Forza Motorsport series, apparently managed to get Forza Motorsport 6 running on the Scorpio at a native 4K and locked 60fps in just two days.
“This is us. This is ForzaTech running 60 frames a second, 4K,” said Turn 10 Studio Software Architect, Chris Tector, to Digital Foundry. “We’re still running with settings that we would have used in Forza 6… but this is also including 4K content… we’ve got authored assets for this set of the models, cars, tracks everything. We pushed it through and made sure the 4K textures were flowing through. We’ve got them all there at the right resolutions and they’re not giving us enough of a bandwidth hit to offset that. If we drop back to when we originally ran and we didn’t have 4K assets, it was maybe one per cent different. We were very much bound on a different point than memory bandwidth. It’s been awesome and this is the point it’s at.”
The amazing thing about Forza 6 on Scorpio is just how much the graphics on it could be pushed, with plenty of resources still to spare- Turn 10 said that they could push the game to Ultra level settings, and still be sitting at only 88% GPU utilization- which is nuts.
“The awesome part about the whole story [is] that we can spend all this time heading into the future,” Tector continued. “Instead of saying, ‘How are we going to wrestle to get the performance on this?’ we’re actually saying we can make this quality trade-off or this quality trade-off and spend that time iterating, heading towards much better image quality. So instead of stressing about getting to a final resolution or a final frame-rate, we can really drive it all into quality.”
Microsoft insists that this is the kind of scaleability that the Scorpio will provide over the existing Xbox One- if so, then they will have truly accomplished their goal with the hardware. We can’t wait to see how other developers utilize its considerable resources.
In-game screenshot of Forza Motorsport 6 running on the Scorpio:
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