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We were hoping that E3 would be the venue to put to rest the question of Xbox One X's raw gaming potential, but only a handful of native titles were revealed - and as such, some degree of scepticism surrounds Microsoft's 'true 4K' claims. In the wake of the event, developers have come forward to talk about impressive results with the system: Monolith has confirmed native 4K for Shadow of War, while Respawn Entertainment says that Titanfall 2 dynamically scales up to 6K resolution. On top of that, Ark developer Studio Wildcard likens Xbox One X to a PC running a GTX 1070 with 16GB of RAM. Microsoft is bullish on the machine's native 4K credentials, with its own early benchmarks painting a compelling picture of the hardware's capabilities. We're publishing those metrics today, but they need to be put into context. Our visit to Microsoft's Redmond campus at the end of March was sandwiched between two Microsoft 'XFest' developer events - one held in the UK a week before our visit, and another held in the US just after. David Cook, a software engineer at Microsoft's Advanced Technology Group (ATG) presented a detailed low-down of the Scorpio Engine GPU, covering many of the same details found in our Project Scorpio/Xbox One X hardware reveal - but bolsters the specs with detailed performance profiling. Despite talking to us exclusively about the hardware previously, Microsoft did not provide these numbers - we sourced them via developer contacts and we further verified them before publishing.
It's a fascinating insight into the performance characteristics of the Scorpio Engine. In addition to the data, the presentation reveals how GPU bottlenecks shift somewhat in the move from Xbox One to Xbox One X - compute power is a defining limitation of the base system, but in many scenarios, this shifts to memory, geometry or pixel limits on the new hardware, necessitating a change in direction from the developer. The focus shifts back to compute - an area where the Scorpio Engine excels. Happily, Microsoft also appears to advocate a move from 4x to 8x anisotropic texture filtering too, very important in getting the most out of an ultra HD presentation.
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