The Xbox One Scorpio, when it was revealed, was played up for its monstrous specs- specs that would enable true native 4K gaming, and also high end VR on a console. That, coupled with Spencer’s assertions since that the Xbox One Scorpio is best used with 4KTVs, has led many to assume that the spec bump for the console is inextricably tied to 4K gaming.
Not so, however. In a discussion of the system with Xbox’s own Major Nelson, Spencer discussed the motivation to make the Scorpio came from delivering hardware innovations for developers to use, innovations that that they are free to use. In other words, if they would rather use the spec bump for something other than delivering 4K gaming, they are free to do so!
“We were thinking about where we wanted to take the Xbox program,” he said. “Any why can’t consoles see the same innovation in hardware that any other device around you has? Any we started to work on platform support to do that, and the culmination to that was Project Scorpio. Which is a 6TFLOPs gaming machine. It’s a great machine for 4K gaming, giving you a 4K frame buffer, so you can see games in all their beauty. Or if developers want to use those 6TFLOPs in any other way, they can do that.”
So- it may be possible we see bigger worlds with more physics based interactivity, and just far better graphics delivered at lower resolutions, all enabled by the Scorpio. Or, of course, developers could simply opt to push 4K, since resolution over gameplay has sadly become a thing of late. But it doesn’t have to be one or the other- the important thing now is that they have a choice.
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