Microsoft has partially lifted the lid on their upcoming enhancement hardware to the Xbox One, currently known as Project Scorpio.

Microsoft gave an exclusive sneak peek at the hardware and juicy tech specs to Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry, which published the details Thursday morning.

Project Scorpio was first announced at Microsoft’s E3 2016 press event. The new machine is intended to run along the same lines as Sony’s PlayStation 4 Pro, which was released last year – an enhanced, more powerful version of the current console which is designed to take advantage of the new generation of 4K, ultra HDTV’s and that act as a complimentary version of the current console. Microsoft has maintained that the Project Scorpio machine is not intended to be a new generation of hardware, meaning that any game released for the new machine will be able to be played on original Xbox One hardware. With that being said, the specs released to Digital Foundry definitely put Project Scorpio into a console class of its own.

Project Scorpio’s CPU will feature 8 custom x86 cores running at 2.3GHz, a GPU with 40 customize compute units at 1172MHz, 12GB of GDDR5 memory, a 1TB hard drive, 326GB/s of memory bandwidth, and of course, a 4K UHD Blu-ray optical drive.

image: Digital Foundry

What all this adds up to is the 6 teraflop beast that Microsoft promised us last year, which will provide a 60% increase in available memory available over the original Xbox One, and whose overall cores run 31% faster than Microsoft’s standard console.

While Microsoft didn’t explicitly reveal any games during Digital Foundry’s visit, they did show off a tech demo of Forza Motorsport running in full 4K glory at 60fps.

Speaking to Digital Foundry about the evolution of Forza on Project Scorpio, Turn 10 Studios Software Architect Chris Tector gushed:

“This is us.This is Forza Tech running 60 frames a second, 4K.”

“The awesome part about the whole story is that we can spend all this time heading into the future. Instead of saying, ‘How are we going to wrestle to get the performance on this?’ we’re actually saying we can make this quality trade-off or this quality trade-off and spend that time iterating, heading towards much better image quality. So instead of stressing about getting to a final resolution or a final frame-rate, we can really drive it all into quality.”

The article also stated that Microsoft was ahead of schedule in their development process for Project Scorpio, and that the machine is on track for a 2017 release.

Rest assured, Microsoft will have a TON of info to reveal at their press event at E3 2017, which will take place Sunday, June 11th at 5pm EST.

What are your thoughts on Microsoft’s Project Scorpio? Are you excited for an ultra-powerful upgrade to the Xbox One, or are you wearing your skeptical pants?

Let us know in the comments section below.

Written by The Watchman

The Watchman is a journeyman gamer who has seen and played a good chunk of gaming history.
He’s also an actor, a reporter, a pro wrestling connoisseur, and some say he’s a cat whisperer.
If you have any questions or just want to drop me a line, hit me up at thewatchman@nerdbacon.com
Or follow me on Twitter @DavetheWatchman
You can also game with me!
Look me up on Xbox Live @ DJKhadoken
Or on PlayStation Network @ Eaglevision_dl