These kits give developers the early version of the console to begin creating games for the device. In terms of design, we would guess these dev kits are very close to the final design of Project Scorpio. A closer look at the hardware shows the XDK (Xbox Development Kit) branding. Looking at the design, this carries a close resemblance to the current Xbox One S. That makes plenty of sense, although there will undoubtedly be some aesthetic tweaks. There are crucial differences to note, such as the disc tray located in black lower half of the console. Speaking to Gamasutra, Kevin Gammill, group program manager for the Xbox Core Platform said: “I kid you not, I go to first-party studios, I go to third-party studios, and they have dev kits stacked. But they basically built blocks, or used Legos, as a gap so they could vent. Well now you can stack these ten-high.” Other changes that are noticeable include an OLED panel on the front of the Xbox Scorpio. This panel comes with its own navigation button and will give developers important system information. The hardware also sports five buttons that are not on the Xbox One S. These allow information to be programmed into the OLED display. Microsoft said earlier this month that it is already rolling out dev kits. However, these units are not realizing the full potential of Project Scorpio. The company will release an XDK update in May and June to bring the console fully up to speed. Nevertheless, the dev kits currently available have a GPU with 44 CUs, rather than 40 on the consumer model; 24GB of DDR5 RAM, compared with 12GB; and a 1TB solid state drive, instead of a 1TB hard drive.
Xbox Scorpio Specs
Last week, Microsoft announced the specs of the console. Eurogamer reported that the Xbox Scorpio will come with the following hardware:
CPU: Eight custom x86 cores clocked at 2.3GHz GPU: 40 customized compute units at 1172MHz Memory: 12GB GDDR5 with 8GB for games Memory bandwidth: 326GB/s Hard drive: 1TB 2.5-inch Optical drive: 4K UHD Blu-ray
It has a compute power 4.5 times more than the current console. Microsoft has already confirmed the device will get 6TFLOPs for horsepower. In February, it was reported the console will get an integrated PSU and deliver 4K streaming. The device will also improve gaming for users on 1080p Full HD screens.
