Microsoft XBOX (XBox One X / Project Scorpio) - Prerelease News and Rumours

I would have paid 500€, I am from Europe, for a cutting edge Scorpio. TBH I would have paid 600€ but I believe that 500€ would have been a fair price. Now if ms prices THIS Xbox Scorpio at 500 I will buy it, cause I have a weak character, but I will consider it overpriced. I believe that the ps4 pro is also overpriced, still at 400€ , with minimum improvements over the basic PS4 ( basically just a beefier gpu , three years after the ps4 launched) and no und drive (a big minus to me) but that's Sony riding on the success of the PS4 and trying to make a buck. Scorpio was supposed to be something different, at least that's how I had interpreted it.

 

so your willing to pay more, bit like buying branded goods.
my point is that they may have gone for zen, but stripped all the stuff not required for console(a lot of the jucy things), clocked it pretty low, as their profiling would've said you need x performance to reach their goals.
but because it's zen then it would've made it worth more to you, with same performance.
I'm not saying zen isn't better, but it might not be there yet, price for the given performance required.

would've been nice though, even as a talking point.

vega is a bit more murky for me as it's also about IP, not just raw performance. But then don't know what modifications have been made and their actual impact.

one thing i will say is, they've seemed to achieve what they said they would, from first glance.

 

i would like to add that, it's a strange position for Ms to be in.
for their stated goals modified jaguar is enough, but for a rolling gen, where Scorpio would become the budget machine, at that point having zen clocked to perform better would be very useful, but not as much in the short to mid term though.

 

Yeah. It's almost like Microsoft were more interested in making a sensible business decision rather than appeasing the fanboys smoking crack and expecting phantom Zen configurations. You need to be in a very strong positions to prioritise the long term game over the short-to-medium play. Because if short-to-medium term doesn't pan out (DRM policies, Kinect) then long-term benefits never get reaped. Scorpio has the most powerful CPU in a console. Even accepting Scorpio is not out yet it'll be fine for years to come.

 

yes, they didn't luck out, it was the right people, the right time the right company to work with -AMD-, the right decisions, it was superb. But a bit of luck was involved. The competition sucked. Sony were on their knees, the PS3 was a big failure no matter what they say. If you lose millions of sales from one generation to another something happened. Nintendo still had the GC. Now the situation reverted, and it is Sony doing things right (in fact, there is nothing incredibly revolutionary about the PS4 yet it triumphs) and then Microsoft and Nintendo lending Sony a helping hand, too.

I remember Sony fans that were totally disheartened back then. I can recall this irish guy, Titanio I think iirc, who couldn't muster the strength to defend the PS3 and got to a point where he left the forums.

welcome to the forums. Hardware wise, with all the nice cooling, DirectX 12 on chip and so on, perhaps it's not that expensive, but more than 450€ is going to hurt.

If our heart flips with emotion and they give users a good dose of love maybe the price is right. If it can be used as a PC then 500€ is cheap, imho. But now we should see the strategy, and the software above all and if it fulfils people's expectations, which is the cornerstone.

 

that's a very original point of view, I expected you would comment on how fugly it is, which...it is. If you expect something more realistic...

Some guy measured Scorpio's motherboard using the USB ports as a reference & surprisingly enough it seems to have similar measures compared to Xbox One S.

 

The look doesn't appeal to me, which I sort of lumped into not feeling the love.

More random thoughts:
Subjectively, I feel that a premium product with Microsoft's positioning it as a more brawny isn't represented well by the fin sandwich, and the relative depth of the lowest layer and topmost layer gives a sort of overbite look. The font and typefacing looks pretty irregular and inelegant, the wispy top logo doesn't impress and would likely be obscured or barely seen in that position.
I don't know if I'd like the number of light sources, the distance they cover, and the multiple planes of annoyance or light pollution they provide either (top, perimeter, logo bump). The contrast in a daylit picture makes it look like it'd be a glaring annoyance in a darkened media situation.

The fin looks like it's just an annoyance that takes a box of given dimensions and just makes it more awkward to size. The kind of lobed appearance doesn't look as "strong" to me in a product that is positioned as a king-of-the hill device.
The bump on the fin makes it look even more toylike, its apparently blocking the safe use of the drive aside.
Even without the bump, the slot and loading area make it look like if you want to put a disc into it from the front of a shelf or media center, the whole thing would have be to positioned rotated at a weird 30-40 degrees from every other thing on a shelf or media center. (edit: the clipped back corner seems to reinforce an expectation for this impractical and discontinuous positioning)
I think the button on the side is an eject button, which makes it kind of off-plane for the drive--don't know if that's much of an objection. If that makes the bump a power button, it's right in the loading area where one can scratch, warp, and then power the console off with the disk stuck halfway.

I do not like the look of the controller, but I would need to put more thought into the ways I don't.

 

He said on the technical video that Scorpio GPU has some Polaris features. That's all he said. I don't know which feature he is mentioning here as specific Polaris features, since those features may already utilized in a way or another in Vega GPUs, too. DF also mentioned custom CUs, Command Processors and 2MB L2 cache for GPU.

I didn't expect to see desktop version of Zen in Scorpio at full force. I thought that MS may use 8 single thread Zen cores @ 2.5GHz in Scorpio and now DF says that MS is using 8 evolved Jaguar cores @ 2.3GHz alongside some modifications to reduce latency/overhead, and also they said that MS has effectively made a hardware implementation of DX12 integrated directly in Command Processors to help CPU. Microsoft expect this modification to reduce CPU rendering workloads by half for DX12 enabled titles.

So while I am partly sad because of them using Jaguar (since it may be a problem for Scorpio in long term) but on the other hand I'm impressed with their design methodology that's looks to be smart balance between price and power. So I prefer to wait and see what will be the result of this optimizations/modifications in practice.

 

A Zen + Vega console with 12GB of ram at 500$...?
Are some people that hopeful?

 

Not at all. $400 yes!

 

Xbox Scorpio may deliver on Bill Gates’ promise of the console as powerful PC.

It's been more than 10 years, but Bill Gates commented that Xbox is a PC.

http://www.polygon.com/2017/4/7/15222066/xbox-scorpio-powerful-pc

"The reason we got into Xbox was not just for gaming," he said at the time. "It's a general purpose computer. In terms of the first generation in particular, where we were so known as a PC company, the need to make clear how we were prioritizing the needs of demanding gamers, that was super important.

"We wouldn't have done it if it was just a gaming device. We wouldn't have gone into the category at all. It was strategically getting into the living room.”

 

so what do you think what would it cost to build a PC that rivals Project Scorpio? That is the question

 

Quite a lot, if you're counting all the components necessary to make a full PC and provide at least all of the functionality of the Scorpio.
-mobo
-cpu
-gpu
-ram
-case
-psu
-supplemental cooling (perhaps)
-hdd
-UHD blu-ray drive
-some physical means of control that almost certainly would require a keyboard and mouse
-system software (including uhd blu-ray software, which doesn't come with most bare drives)
-Cable(s)

Correction: There don't seem to be any commercially available UHD PC drives. Not that I can find, anyway. So that's an additional $200 right there for a standalone player. Pioneer is supposedly making a PC UHD drive (at some point), but it's Japan-only.

 

If it comes in at 399 like that Neogaf rumor, I say good riddance Zen. It's not like this entire generation soon to span 5 consoles (PS4, PS4 Pro, Xbox One, Xbox One S, Scorpio) isn't based on Jaguar, so where's the huge benefit? We think some dev is gonna be all "I'm gonna go out of my way to target this new console with 2% of the install base with huge Zen based gameplay!" No.

The GPU is far far more important. And I like the 200 more ghz. It's small but it's something.

 

Those measures are so exact one surmises they plan to use Xbox One casing. Probably save money too.

I would have liked some nice aggressive new form factor to distinguish Scorpio in a vacuum, but price trumps that as well. All is forgiven at 399.

 

This pretty much sums it up. More than $399 would be cringe worthy but at $399, they seem to have hit it just right.

 

Now lets see if they actually do that. I could see $449.

My guess if my life depended on it right now would be 399 1TB, 449 2TB. Maybe I feel that's 80% likely.

But I could see 449 1TB, 499 2TB. Maybe 20% likely.

 

it's pretty interesting though that prior to the reveal it was all about if they could really run the x1 games at 4k, surely it would only be the 1080p ones and even then it would be a stretch lots of compromises.
but due to zen and vega might help make that even possible.

now if what their saying is true they've done what they said they would, x1 games at 4k, 900p ones also with optimizations which people expected to be the case for the 1080p titles anyway. So all that covers 90% of their games library.
Sure even if some could hit 4k they may choose not to, or may just be out of reach but they've pretty much hit their goal that many thought they couldn't.

seems to be a crazy good achievement in my books given the expectations. I was one of the optimistic ones that said 1080p to 4k, 900p to 1800p, and they've seemed to over deliver.

i don't see how they could've released last year, the manufacturing process yields would've been too bad.
reason i say that is they hit 6TF dead on, their the type of people that would push the frequency to the limit as long as it doesn't cost.
they needed 6TF to hit their objectives.

disappointed about no zen, vega one two punch, sure.
but more impressed by what it can do, and now i want to know more about how it's able to do it.
if it brings it in at a nicer price point even better, still a big if though.
people seem to think no zen means it must be cheaper than they expected, where the truth could be, with zen could be more expensive than they thought. Big difference in the end.

 

The anchor for everyone's hardware expectations should have always been, "Plays Xbox One games @4K at the same or better framerate as the original system". It's what they said they were going to do, and it's what they delivered. They also claimed it would be the most powerful console ever, and it will be by a decent margin. Any expectations people may have had beyond this were entirely of their own creation.

 

Nice!
Practically the same size.