Forza on Scorpio: 4K60 with power to spare
But the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Specs are one thing, but Microsoft is promising that both 900p and 1080p Xbox One games should be able to run at native 4K on Project Scorpio. We needed to see validation of this, meaning we needed to see software - a tough call so many months out from release.
Regardless, Microsoft duly obliged, showing us a ForzaTech demonstration with the Xbox One engine operating at native 4K, at a locked 60fps. As you can see in the screenshot above, GPU utilisation is remarkably low at just 60-70 per cent (you can grab a full 4K PNG version of the above shot
here) - but we should stress that this is basically an Xbox One port, not representative of the full quality we'll see in final software.
"This is us. This is ForzaTech running 60 frames a second, 4K," says Turn 10 Studio Software Architect, Chris Tecton. "We're still running with settings that we would have used in Forza 6... but this is also including 4K content... we've got authored assets for this set of the models, cars, tracks everything. We pushed it through and made sure the 4K textures were flowing through. We've got them all there at the right resolutions and they're not giving us enough of a bandwidth hit to offset that. If we drop back to when we originally ran and we didn't have 4K assets, it was maybe one per cent different. We were very much bound on a different point than memory bandwidth. It's been awesome and this is the point it's at."
The demo stacks up the maximum amount of cars and runs the full AI and physics simulations. It's a highly taxing stress test, used to enforce the strict budgets in Forza Motorsport to ensure the locked 60fps the series is famous for. The ForzaTech port to Scorpio took two days to complete and was fully performant from day one. In fact, the team can push ForzaTech to the equivalent of PC's ultra-level settings and we're still sitting at 88 per cent GPU utilisation; in terms of system utilisation, this is ballpark with Xbox One at 1080p on its default settings. Clearly this is just one game, but the point is that Scorpio doesn't just scale Xbox One engines to 4K. For the Forza engine at least, there's overhead, and plenty of it.
"The awesome part about the whole story [is] that we can spend all this time heading into the future," enthuses Tector. "Instead of saying, 'How are we going to wrestle to get the performance on this?' we're actually saying we can make this quality trade-off or this quality trade-off and spend that time iterating, heading towards much better image quality. So instead of stressing about getting to a final resolution or a final frame-rate, we can really drive it all into quality."
Of course, if you're going to show off a game on a new Xbox, choosing one of the most visually accomplished, well-optimised first-party engines we've ever tested is the way to go, but Microsoft is insistent that the results and scalability Turn 10 demoed to us is "not atypical". The fact that the studio got great results from Scorpio hardware so early perhaps also explains why Microsoft is ready to unveil the hardware to the users so far ahead of release. With everyone we met there's a genuine, infectious excitement and confidence about the new box. And the fact that the platform holder is willing to share so much so early also suggests that E3 2017 is going to be one to remember.
