This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

Scorpio

Well, that didn't accept long. When Sony unveiled the new PS4 Pro, nosotros spent some fourth dimension talking about 4K, the departure between native and upscaled content, and what Sony can and can't deliver as far every bit 4K is concerned with a GPU based on the RX 480. Now, nosotros've got Microsoft weighing in on the capabilities of Projection Scorpio.

While the bulk of thisUSA Today commodity concerns the recent launch of ReCore, the interview includes this quote from Shannon Loftis, the general manager of Microsoft Studios Publishing. "Any games we're making that we're launching in the Scorpio fourth dimension frame, we're making sure they tin natively render at 4K."

At present we know what Microsoft and Sony are going to fight about for the next yr, and information technology's non going to exist specially pretty. The statement over resolution and which is better is ultimately more than of a fanboy-fueled rantfest than a practical stardom. The Xbox One ofttimes renders at a lower resolution than the PS4, but the biggest difference between the ii consoles equally far as I've seen isn't their final resolutions — it's their colour. Microsoft's internal rescaler has a tendency to produce crushed blacks where Sony'southward colour balance is distinctly different.

Killer Instinct Comparison

MS has since corrected the problem, but issues like this with "crushed" black are nevertheless more visible than subtle resolution differences betwixt the Xbox Ane and PS4.

We already know that the PS4 is targeting a rescaled 4K rather than native resolution. While the console is technically capable of 4K output, it doesn't brand much sense to burn that much performance in resolution lone. Metrics like TFLOPS are oft trotted out to make comparisons betwixt GPUs, but this is at best an indirect comparison method. More of import than TFLOPS, for our purposes, are render outputs (ROPS) and total retention bandwidth.

Stepping up to 4K from 1080p quadruples the number of pixels that demand to be lit, shaded, and fatigued every single frame. This, in turn, means you need substantially more GPU horsepower to drive an acceptable frame rate. Every bit those of you lot who follow the PC marketplace are probably aware, one of the key differences betwixt AMD's GCN architecture and Nvidia'south Maxwell and Pascal architectures is that GCN scales ameliorate every bit the resolution rises. GCN takes a smaller functioning hit from moving from 1080p to 4K in near cases, and therefore compares better against Nvidia cards as a outcome. This holds truthful beyond both Maxwell and Pascal — simply non for the RX 480. The RX 480 doesn't amend every bit resolution increases and sometimes even scores worse relative to Squad Light-green at 4K than information technology did at 1080p. Compare Polaris against the older R9 390, which does follow expected GCN scaling, and you can run into why. Polaris is a 2304:144:32 blueprint, significant information technology has 2,304 cores, 144 texture units, and 32 ROPS. This translates to 35.8 Gigapixels/south worth of fill up rate, 161 Gigatexels/s, and 256GB/s of retentivity bandwidth. The R9 390, in dissimilarity, is a 2560:160:64 design, with 64 Gigapixels/s of fill rate, 160 Gigatexels/due south of texturing, and 384GB/s worth of memory bandwidth.

I tin't tell you whether whatsoever given title is held dorsum by pixel fillrate or retentivity bandwidth, but we can look to the different performance of the RX 480 versus the R9 390 in 4K and conclude that one or both of these factors is responsible for the meaning difference in functioning scaling. Neither of these factors is captured past a reliance on TFLOPS as a metric for GPU performance.

Can Microsoft build a GPU that achieves the listed 6TFLOPS but drives 4K? Probably. It would be a GPU with fewer cores compared to GCN, at to the lowest degree 64 ROPS, and a slap-up deal of memory bandwidth — the "over 320GB/south" quoted in the official Scorpio information seems on the depression side, honestly. And that's earlier we even talk virtually ability consumption; 4K requires significantly more ability thanks to the need to drive all those pixels.

But the larger question here is "Why should people care?" And I don't think this is something to be ignored. Driving native 4K resolution is swell if you sit down within three feet of your TV, or if you game on a 72-inch behemoth. Most people do neither of those things. Features like VR, HDR, and fast frame rates at lower resolutions would practice a good bargain more to amend panel gaming than just hurling more pixels at a given target.

We've already striking the betoken of diminishing marginal return when it comes to 4K. Microsoft may want to brand a marketing point with this, and it'south true that based on its raw specs, Scorpio will deliver more than firepower than the PlayStation 4 Pro. But I honestly think we're reaching a point where features besides raw resolution are going to drive gaming experiences.

At present read: The all-time free games on the Xbox One