Microsoft's Xbox: Project Scorpio dev kit revealed

[HEXUS]

Packs juicier specs like 24GB of RAM, a more powerful GPU, and an OLED status screen.

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[zoomee]

"It's much easier for a game developer to come in higher and tune down, than come in lower and tune up. Or nail it. That just rarely happens"

Lazy is the word the comes to mind.

[sedontane]

Lazy is the word the comes to mind.

As a video game programmer. Optimisation is the word that comes to mind. We are busy enough realising the dreams of designers to carefully plan EVERY features impact on memory, GPU time, CPU time.

We still need to fit it in the end specs at the end. All we end up doing is time shifting that work to the end of the project, when we have that whole picture of the game to work with. Then you can find the assumptions, hacks and optimisations to fit within the constraints you have.

The devkit being more powerful so we can test on it from the get go, instead of building on a PC which is more powerful but differs more. That sounds great. Kudos to MS for making the decision to go big.

[sykobee]

zoomee has clearly never written any software.

Regardless, this devbox really only gives vastly more memory space and 10% GPU headroom, so the optimisation here is actually for graphical assets. In development you can speed up builds by skipping texture compression steps, for example, or do hot-swap textures during gameplay (because uncompressed in memory), so in reality it's not so much an optimisation provider than a development speed helper.

I guess the memory can also be used to hold lots of trace data (in problem areas of the game), etc, for later analysis.

[fail_quail]

"It's much easier for a game developer to come in higher and tune down, than come in lower and tune up.

It's much better now, but i really wish game developers had followed that approach with the previous console gen. Games were more often than not built for the consoles spec then half-heartedly increased a bit for the PC port. Left us with horrible low-res textures that modders usually had to re-create. :/

[Xlucine]

So either scorpio is rolling with 10% of the graphical CUs disabled for yields, or this has a different mask - highly unlikely. Perhaps we'll see a scorpio S down the line once yields improve with the full chip enabled?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

So either scorpio is rolling with 10% of the graphical CUs disabled for yields, or this has a different mask - highly unlikely. Perhaps we'll see a scorpio S down the line once yields improve with the full chip enabled?

It makes me wonder is there a 44 CU desktop part too??

[Xlucine]

If 4 ryzen cores can slot into the gap that 8 jaguar cores used to fill it'll make a very tasty APU