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A Microsoft white paper titled “Reaching 4K and GPU Scaling Across Multiple Xbox Devices’ has found its way into the hands of Digital Foundry, though sadly it doesn’t feature the revelations on the upcoming console that you’d hope.
Essentially, the paper outlines a host of techniques developers can and should use if they wish to get the most out of the new hardware. This includes “sparse rendering”, which is more commonly known as checkerboard rendering thanks its widespread use on PS4 Pro.
In fact the only concrete hardware info revealed is that the Scorpio will drop the problematic ESRAM of the Xbox One, offer boosted L2 cache and support memory compression.
Despite the decision to abandon ESRAM, Microsoft makes it clear that developers should continue to optimise for it to ensure good Xbox One performance.
“ESRAM remains essential to achieving high performance on both Xbox One and Xbox One S,” the whitepaper states. “However, Project Scorpio and PC are not provided with ESRAM. Because developers are not allowed to ship a Project Scorpio-only SKU, optimising for ESRAM remains critical to performance on Microsoft platforms.”
This statement also reaffirms Microsoft’s public messaging regarding not leaving the Xbox One behind.
Digital Foundry also theorised that the Scorpio CPU will not be as advanced as the GPU, leading to a similar situation to the PS4 Pro, where the CPU becomes the performance bottleneck.
Source: Digital Foundry
