Microsoft Offers a Closer Look at the Project Scorpio Dev Kit

Microsoft offers a closer look at the Project Scorpio dev kit

Microsoft is teasing its Project Scorpio dev kit with a new video that unveils some details about the dev kit, we can also take a look at some the console’s hardware and overall appearance.

Larry Hryb speaks with Xbox engineer Kevin Gammill about the developer kit’s power and functionality, and how the Project Scorpio will be different than this dev kit.

Check out the new video down below:

Gammill first explained that the need for this separate piece of hardware comes down to flexibility for the game developers. In his experience, he’s found that they like to come in at a “higher spec than what the retail kits would be,” so it’s important to provide “additional headroom for the developers” to start higher and tune lower as their shipping date approaches.

Gammill then broke down the differences between the Scorpio dev kit and the final console, of which there are a surprising many. Compared to the retail kit, the dev kit has four more CUs, 12 more gigabytes of RAM (totally 24 gigabytes of DDR5 RAM), and an additional 1 terabyte SSD hard disk drive. This extra headroom gives developers leverage to improve iteration times and debug things more quickly. From the exterior, the dev kit looks “completely different” from the Project Scorpio console. It features an alternate front-panel OLED display that can show frame rate, mini versions of an in-development game, or completely new games designed specifically for front-panel display. The dev kit also has five programmable buttons developers can use to change gameplay.

According to Gammill, the Xbox engineering team included “a second NIC to allow developers to essentially monitor their network traffic on the main NIC and have all their debug traffic on the second.”

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