Sony has just unveiled its most powerful console yet - the PlayStation 4 Pro. Giving it a year of breathing room, Microsoft has confirmed its next project, the Xbox Scorpio, will not be released until the fourth quarter of 2017. This difference, however, is sure to give the Redmond-based company enough time to develop what could be the most powerful console in gaming.
The Most Powerful Console Ever
When Project Scorpio was first announced, Microsoft was already promising that it would be the most powerful console ever. And in an interview with Albert Pinello, Tech Radar discovered just how powerful the device will be.
The Xbox Scorpio will have 6 TFLOPS (trillion floating-point operations per second) of computing performance. "The number we've picked, the 6 TFLOPS, the memory bandwidth, was designed for us to be able to let developers of existing Xbox One games to take their engines and run them at 4K," he said. "Native, true, 4K resolutions, and that was our internal benchmark for picking the specs that we chose for Project Scorpio."
However, Pinello was also quick to say that that this technology is only for the taking of game developers, but will definitely not be applicable to all games. Afterall, it will be up to the game titles to take advantage of the technology, but it will not be a requirement.
Backwards Compatibility Will Continue
"Scorpio is part of the Xbox One family ... all of your games and accessories will work," Pinello said. "Your existing games will run better on Scorpio, and ... we didn't want to leave gamers behind."
In other words, the same game that is plugged into or installed in the Xbox One can be plugged into or installed again in the Xbox Scorpio. The difference, of course, will be console performance.
Why Wait A Year
With the recent release of the Xbox One S, it only made sense to Microsoft to hold out on the release of the Xbox Scorpio, but still announce the same. According to WCCTech, the company did not want its customers to blindly purchase the Xbox One S.