With Microsoft due to show off its next console, dubbed Project Scorpio, at the annual E3 gaming conference on Sunday, the company decided to give the public another glimpse at the developer kits that went out to developers to prepare games for the new device. The developer kit consoles have a few different components and are generally more powerful than the devices that will be unveiled next week.
In order for developers to produce games for Project Scorpio, Microsoft has provided them with souped up consoles in order to deploy test builds more quickly and to initially be more liberal with RAM consumption before tuning memory usage as the game gets closer to shipping. Project Scorpio retails units will ship with 12GB of RAM whereas the dev kit version ships with 24GB.
The developer model also ships with a 1TB SSD which retails models won’t come with, this was included to let developers run games, find bugs, debug the game, and redeploy the game as fast as possible. This process is helped along with the inclusion of Xbox transfer device; it allows devs to deploy a game build from a PC to the console around five times faster than before.
Probably the major difference in the dev kits is the onboard display and five programmable buttons. These are useful for developers who are now able to run the machines without a monitor hooked up to the device. Some developers have made mini-games, for fun, just for these small displays; according to the guys in the video tour, Snake is playable on the mini-display.
The last key bit of information to note about these dev kits is the way the air flows through them. Rather that air passing through the top of the device, air goes in the back and out the sides. The major benefit of designing the system like this is that you can stack the devices without worrying about overheating. Some studios have as many as ten devices stacked.
If all goes according to plan, Microsoft will unveil the name, price, and design of Project Scorpio at its E3 press conference on Sunday 11, June at 2 PM PT / 5 PM ET.