The Xbox One Scorpio is already planned to be a bit of a beast when it launches later this year- but as it turns out, the development kit for the hardware are even better equipped than the consumer version will be. Gamasutra has managed to check out the development hardware for Xbox One Scorpio, and it’s a staggering, dramatic leap over what we are slated to get this Holiday.
The most iterative difference is in the GPU- where the consumer version will have a 6 TFLOP GPU with 40 CUs, the dev kit version has 6.6 TFLOPs, with 44 CUs. On the other, in terms of memory, the dev kits have a staggering 24GB of memory, over the 12GB of memory that the retail version will ship with (which in itself is a step up from the 8GB of memory that the standard Xbox One and PS4 have).
“At a high level, it’s much easier for a game developer to come in higher and tune down, than come in lower and tune up. Or nail it. That just rarely happens,” Kevin Gammill, Microsoft’s group program manager for Xbox Core Platform, said, explaining why the Scorpio dev kit is a bit beefier than its retail counterpart. “Our overarching design principle was to make it easy for devs to hit our goals: 4K, 4K textures, rocksteady framerates, HDR, wide color gamut, and spatial audio.”
Thus, the dev kit is even more of a beast than the Scorpio we are getting- hopefully, there will be a day soon when the consoles we can buy from stores come with 24GB of RAM right off the bat, though.