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Scorpio

With Sony's PlayStation iv Pro now shipping, at that place'southward a great bargain of speculation around Microsoft'southward upcoming Project Scorpio. Microsoft has implied it wants to leapfrog both the Xbox 1 and the PS4 Pro past a pregnant margin, but details on how these improvements would impact the existing Xbox Ane ecosystem have been few and far betwixt.

While Scorpio will have extra bells and whistles for 4K players, the console'southward advantages won't exist reserved for them, Windows Central reports. Existing Xbox Ane games with dynamic resolutions will hold their target resolutions and frame rates more than oftentimes, even without patches and updates. Given the horsepower Scorpio is supposed to pack relative to the Xbox One, "more oft" really ought to be "all the fourth dimension," since the new platform is supposedly so much more powerful than its 2013 predecessor, only nosotros'll have to run across how that plays out.

The more intriguing rumor is that games designed for 4K will still return into 1080p when played on 1080p screens through the use of supersampling. Super-sampled antialiasing is the best (though too the well-nigh plush) method of antialiasing. Downsampling — the practise of rendering a game at a high resolution internally earlier outputting the final result at a lower resolution — and supersampling can exist treated as more or less the aforementioned thing, at least for the purposes of this word.

The PS4 Pro uses a checkerboard blueprint to step up to 4K and we expect the Xbox One to take its own methods of doing then as well.

This suggests that Microsoft may take a somewhat different tack from Sony when it comes to what knobs and dials developers get to dabble. So far, we've seen game publishers target a variety of experiences and ideas with the PS4 Pro. Some games have offered higher frame rates at the same resolution, or stepped upward to college resolutions at the same frame rate, or offered amend visual effects and capabilities but lower resolutions. Offering antialiasing as a coating filter selection would be a proficient style to improve game visuals while simplifying the developer'southward life. AMD and Nvidia accept offered global options for AA for years, though their efficacy varies depending on the game you lot play and the type of engine it uses.

Every bit before, if you want the full advantages of Scorpio, you will need a 4K screen, but that's not specially surprising either. The new console will offer a 4K Blu-ray player, HDMI 2.0a, and HDR support. Windows Central is also claiming Scorpio will output "True 4K" (their capitalization), which is almost certainly more than marketing blurb than fact. As with the PS4 Pro, the question isn't whether the Xbox Scorpio volition be able to output 4K, but whether it'll exist able to hold that resolution in modernistic AAA titles. Given that GPUs like the GTX 1080 Ti have simply recently crossed the threshold of what we'd personally telephone call a 4K GPU, it'due south not applied to assume a panel will carry an equivalent GPU less than 9 months from now. No matter how ambitious the platform's design goals were, power consumption is going to put a hard limit on how much firepower you tin pack into Scorpio'due south chassis.