Microsoft Xbox Project Scorpio improves 1080p playback of games

Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox console, which the company is working on under the name Project Scorpio, will not only offer 4k playback with new games, but also improve the display of games on TVs with a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels. That’s what Windows Central claims.

With Project Scorpio, Xbox games that use dynamic scaling are more likely to maintain their resolution to reach target frame rates. For example, on the Xbox One, Halo 5 and The Witcher III dynamically adjusted their resolutions to prioritize reaching 60fps and 30fps, respectively. According to Windows Central, Project Scorpio is less likely to require games to lower their resolution in this way. The site is based on an Unlocked interview with Phil Spencer.

Another advantage that Microsoft would like to highlight for using Project Scorpio in combination with a full HDTV is the support for supersampling. This technique ensures high quality anti-aliasing by rendering at a higher resolution and then downsampling. Due to the heavy burden this draws on the graphics hardware, this has so far not been applied to consoles.

Finally, Project Scorpio shader will support model 6.0 of the Direct3D API. This successor to shader model 5.0 from 2009 provides efficiency improvements and optimizations, among other things, by using the LLVM compiler. Incidentally, the current Xbox One models will also have shader model 6.0 as soon as it becomes available.

Project Scorpio will receive a standard uhd-blu-ray player on board and can have hdmi 2.0a and hdr support, Windows Central further reports. Microsoft has since put Project Scorpio on its site, stating that the console will be released in the summer of 2017 and will have 6tflops of graphics processing power.