Xbox Project Scorpio will be at E3
Teaser image shows "4K" chip—press conference moved to Sunday June 11.
Despite some umming and ahhing from Xbox boss Phil Spencer in January, it looks like Microsoft will showcase its upcoming 4K games console dubbed "Project Scorpio" at this year's E3.
The company tweeted out an invite to its annual E3 media briefing, which features a teaser render of Scorpio's supposedly 4K-capable CPU/GPU combo. Unlike previous years, Microsoft's press conference is taking place on the Sunday before E3, rather than the Monday. Those interested can tune in at 14:00 PDT/22:00 BST on June 11 to find out more.
Microsoft's Project Scorpio was unveiled at E3 2016 alongside the Xbox One S. The latter, which features a much improved design as well as a 4K Blu-ray drive, has rejuvenated the Xbox brand after a shaky launch. But Sony's PlayStation 4 continues to dominate the console market, with the recently released PlayStation 4 Pro giving console gamers access to 4K games—some native, some upscaled—for the first time.
Scorpio is set to be much more powerful than the PS4 Pro, and will sport a GPU with six teraflops of processing power (FP32) versus the 4.12 teraflops of the PS4 Pro. This, along with other improvements to CPU and memory, should make Scorpio capable of playing at least some games at a native 4K resolution, rather than the fancy (but admittedly decent) upscaling used by the PS4 Pro.
While that's impressive, neither the PS4 Pro or Scorpio marks a return the glory days of the console in the late '90s and early '00s, where the likes of the PlayStation 2 and Nintendo 64 featured much more powerful hardware than PCs at the time.
Nvidia's high-end GTX 1080, for example, sports a mean 8.2 teraflops of FP32 processing power—enough to make true native 4K gaming at 60FPS just about possible.
