Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb is looking to build even more hype for Microsoft's upcoming Project Scorpio Xbox One refresh by talking about the developer kit that it's now shipping out to partner studios to build new games for and port older ones to the new, ultra-fast system. Detailing that devkit in a new video, Nelson and Kevin Gammill from the Xbox engineering team, talk about why a devkit is necessary and what it offers developers.
One of the big features that the devkit has that the eventual Project Scorpio won't have, is even more power. More headroom to create the next-generation of gaming experiences.While Scorpio is said to have as much as 6 TFLOPS of graphical power - almost as much as a GTX 970 - the devkit will have a little more.
We don't know quite how much more, but it could be quite substantial. The system has four more compute units, 10 percent more than the standard Project Scorpio system. It also has an additional 12GB of RAM, bringing the total to 20 - a huge leap over the standard Scorpio and four times that of the original Xbox One. There's also a 1TB SSD built into it, for faster load times than a hard drive is capable of.
The casing also has five additional buttons on the front panel, which can be pre-programmed by the developers to give them some unique commands. There's even a miniature display on the front that some devs have made their own little games for.
By forcing air out of the rear of the Scorpio, developers can now stack consoles together without causing overheating problems.
Based on feedback from developers, Microsoft has also added a new "transfer device," which allows for a huge throughput from PC connections, making it easier to deploy software from a developer PC, right to the Project Scorpio devkit.
Project Scorpio is slated for release sometime in Q4 this year.
