New Project Scorpio specs leak ditches ESRAM, reiterates GPU will be 4.5 times as powerful as Xbox One’s

By Brenna Hillier

Xbox Scorpio, now with added numbers and acronyms.

Project Scorpio, the mysterious new Xbox One hardware iteration expected at the end of the year, is now ever so slightly less mysterious.

Digital Foundry got its hands on a new Microsoft document, which it has verified with Xbox developer sources, which gives some clues as to Project Scorpio’s innards.

According to the leaked document, Project Scorpio does not have ESRAM – the 32MB of super quick memory integrated with the Xbox One’s very processor.

ESRAM is an interesting hardware solution which helps developers cope with Xbox One’s memory size and speed limitations, but Scorpio is just going to have faster, better RAM instead – so there’s no need for this extra bit of help. According to the documents, Scorpio’s memory setup can easily outperform Xbox One, so nothing has been lost.

Developers will still need to optimise their games to support ESRAM, though, because the Xbox One can’t do without it – and Microsoft has said there will be no Project Scorpio exclusives.

The other major note form the document is another mention of Scorpio’s 6 teraflop GPU – about 4.5 times as powerful as the one in the Xbox One. This isn’t totally new information, but it’s nice to see it reiterated.

In the nitty gritties, the paper says Scorpio has four times for L2 cache of the Xbox One, putting it on par with the AMD Polaris range, and that the GPU is capable of Delta Colour Compression, like the PS4 Pro.

There’s plenty more discussion of Xbox Scorpio’s innards in the video above. Details are subject to change, of course, in the months before launch – but probably not much.