According to the Eurogamer report, the Xbox hardware team promises that the existing catalogue of Xbox One games will run smoother, load faster, and look better on the Scorpio. That’s a big promise considering the hardships that the Xbox One had to overcome in order to offer support of Xbox 360 games, but apparently the Scorpio team has kept backward compatibility in mind from the start.
Project Scorpio should launch with the ability to improve the vast majority of existing compatible titles in the following areas:
Those are a lot of big promises to keep. It sounds like Microsoft is being realistic though and has admitted that some of the enhancements may cause compatibility issues on a very small percentage of titles, which means certain improvements may not apply to all games. Players familiar with the PS4 Pro are already used to that catch.
2.) Maximum possible resolution on dynamic titles - “With the additional performance of the Scorpio Engine, we expect to see those titles hit the maximum render resolution that those titles support… As you know, we can’t boost it to 4K, but definitely the maximum resolution the game supports, we should be able to run it.”
3.) Improved texture filtering - “We built into the hardware the capability of overwriting all bilinear and all trilinear fetches to be anisotropic… And then we’ve dialed up the anisotropic all the way up to max. All of our titles by default when you’re running on Scorpio, they’ll be full anisotropic.”
4.) Scorpio GameDVR support - “Even though a lot of this content will be 1080p, we’ll have the benefit of HEVC, the ultra high bit-rate, so we’ll be able to do those retroactive screen captures at a really high quality.”
5.) Faster loading - “… We’ve that we’ve improved the hard disk speed. We’re actually promising developers a 50 per cent improvement in overall bandwidth for the purposes of driving 4K textures, but this also helps us in this situation where you’re running existing Xbox One and Xbox 360 titles. They will also benefit from the faster hard disk.”
What do you think of the improvements that the Scorpio will bring to older games? Will they be worth the price tag? Let us know in the comments.
Project Scorpio is expected to release during holiday 2017.
