I've been wondering..If Forza Motorsport 7 will be a launch title for Scorpio and if Microsoft is keeping their word that no-one will be left behind, could it be possible that we will see a Forza Motorsport 7 with 2 modes on XBOX ONE?
- 60 FPS tuned down version
- 30 FPS with extra graphical enhancements
Could this be an option for Turn10? I know that it always has been about 60 FPS but what
IF T10 would like to give the XBOX ONE owners a taste of their new features and techniques used for the Scorpio?
Microsoft already confirmed that all 1st party titles releasing in the Scorpio timeframe will be 4K native.
Forza Motorsport 7 should easily be capable of 4K 60 fps on Scorpio.
It's important to remember that 4K doesn't require 4x the total power of a console. For instance, The Last of Us on PS4 Pro runs at 4x the resolution of The Last of Us on PS4 yet the Pro is only 2.5~ as powerful as the PS4. Most benchmark you can find that compare 1080p to 4K on the same game and settings show that 4K consumes a little over half the framerate the game is capable of running at in 1080p.
You might be asking, if this is true then why are PS4 Pros new titles only running at 1800p? For a few reason honestly. One, the games themselves are pushing graphical effects that are using enough GPU power to prevent 4K native(it is still only 2.5x~ as powerful after all.). Two, the architecture for the PS4 Pro is more complicated than the Scorpio and even the PS4. What they don't tell you about the PS4 Pro is that it's basically two PS4 GPUs on the same die. This is why it consumes as much power as two PS4s and why they are using checkerboarding for all their new games. It's also why original PS4 games see no improvement on the PS4 Pro. When running PS4 titles the Pro turns off one of the GPUs and lowers the clock speed and runs the title as if it was a normal PS4. The reason for checkerboarding is because, like VR, it's easier to have separate GPUs working on separate projects rather than trying to do the same workload.
When PS4 Pro is being used for VR is tasks each GPU on the die to each eye on the VR device, so in the same way checkerboarding tasks each GPU with rendering each part of the checkerboard then combining the product. Why checkerboarding and not just one left and one right? Simple, if you had one GPU per side and something on the right screen was causing the GPU dedicated to the right screen to struggle then it would bring down the overall performance of the game. By checkerboarding you can spread out the processing power of both GPUs across the screen rather than left and right. VR just has to worry about pushing PS4 quality to each eye so it isn't as much of a problem as trying to maintain 1800p across an entire render.
The reason that 1080p vs 4K games only see a little of half framerate consumption has to do with the fact that resolution isn't everything, resolution does require quite a bit of graphical power but everything else adds up too; including particle effects, AA, polygons, HD textures, lighting and more.
I think it's reasonable to expect Forza Motorsport 7 to run at 4K native with 60 fps locked with large increases to polygon count and particle effects, might even be capable of real global illumination. One great bonus to 4K is that aliasing is mostly negated just from the native resolution meaning that games can run without AA at all and barely have any jaggies. The days of AA eating graphical power are over.
The Scorpio will be 4.58x as powerful as a normal Xbox One(3.3x of a PS4)(Difference between Scorpio and PS4 Pro is 1.8 TF or an entire PS4s worth of GPU power.) Don't be surprised if we see Gears of War 4, Forza Horizon 3, Killer Instinct and Halo Wars 2 patches that make them 4K native.
To answer your question, there will be two versions of Forza 7; 4K 60 fps on Scorpio and 1080p 60 fps on Xbox One. You will be able to play 1080p on Scorpio but it's up in the air if the 1080p version will just be the 4K version downscaled or if you can set it to 1080p on purpose and get more particle effects and higher quality models.
