The new Xbox Project Scorpio will improve performance for games on Xbox One and Xbox 360 in these five areas.
“Project Scorpio” will be the next Xbox that aims to impress even with older Xbox games thanks to its performance. Thanks to backward compatibility, Xbox One and Xbox 360 games can be played on Scorpio.
According to Microsoft, games from your existing library are expected to run smoother, look better, and have shorter loading times.
After the hardware specs of Scorpio were revealed, we will now show you in which areas Scorpio can enhance older games.
Smooth gameplay without stuttering
There is a lot of power in Scorpio’s graphics unit, which runs at 1172 MHz. With this performance, games on Scorpio that had issues with stable frame rates on Xbox One should run better. However, this does not mean that 30 FPS suddenly become 60 FPS. Games themselves determine the frame rate at which they are played, and there is currently no way to lift these limits.
Games on Scorpio should run closer and more consistently to the target frame rate and experience less stutter.
With 6 teraflops of graphical power, you should be delivered a smoother and better gaming experience in many situations.
Higher resolution in games with dynamic display
Current games utilize a feature that aims to provide smoother gameplay: dynamic resolution.
Dynamic resolution scales the game’s display to achieve the best performance. For example, let’s assume a game targets a frame rate of 30 FPS. If intense, demanding scenes occur that threaten the intended 30 FPS, the game’s resolution will be scaled down. With the now displayed lower resolution, the console can more easily maintain the 30 FPS target.
Games like Doom, Battlefield 1, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, The Division, or Halo 5 utilize this feature.
“With the additional power of the Scorpio engine, it should be possible to achieve the maximum resolution that games support,” says Andrew Goossen from Microsoft. However, this does not mean that games can suddenly be boosted to 4K if they do not support it. However, the maximum resolution that a game supports should be achieved through the better hardware.
Improved texture filtering
While resolution is an important factor for a “beautiful” image, texture filtering also plays a significant role. Especially compared to PC, there were noticeable graphical differences on PS4 and Xbox One in the past that were due to texture filtering.
The hardware in the Scorpio has been overhauled so that bilinear and trilinear filtering is replaced by maximum anisotropic filtering. As a result, there should be “smoother” textures in many games. The 16-fold anisotropic filtering makes a big difference for titles that previously only supported 4-fold anisotropic filtering. By the way, this feature is also applied to Xbox 360 games.
A clear comparison is shown in the following image from Eurogamer.net. On the left, you see Forza Motorsport 6 Apex on PC with standard anisotropic filtering. On the right, you see the same game with 16-fold anisotropic filtering.
Support for GameDVR
The new Scorpio is expected to be capable of recording videos in 4K and 60 FPS due to its powerful hardware. For this, the efficient HEVC codec is used, and recordings also work with backward-compatible games. Even if these rarely need more than 1080p for recordings, the codec ensures very high video quality.
Furthermore, “Retroactive Screen Captures” is a feature that allows you to go frame by frame through the recordings and choose the perfect screenshot of your game.
Shorter loading times
This change will please many console players who have already fallen asleep during loading screens. According to Microsoft’s official statement, loading times on the console are expected to be significantly shorter. A large part of loading time is related to the processor, which is now 31% faster than its predecessor.
Another important point regarding loading times is the speed of the hard drive, which is expected to have 50% more bandwidth on the Scorpio.
Point 3 is the RAM in the system. Scorpio has a total of 12 GB RAM, of which 8 GB are available. Previous Xbox One games were developed to use 5GB RAM. This means that 3 GB RAM are “left over” to help speed up the system.
Disadvantages with older games?
At first glance, the performance improvements for Xbox One and Xbox 360 games sound good. However, there is a small percentage of games where the improvements may cause compatibility issues. For these games, there may not be 16-fold anisotropic filtering, but perhaps only 4-fold. This is to ensure that games run at the best possible performance and do not present any problems for the player.
Overall, the improvements sound good and should provide a whole new experience regarding console performance.
