At its announcement last year, Microsoft barely revealed anything about the highly-anticipated Project Scorpio other than its 6 TeraFlops of power, an octa-core processor, and more prominently the promise of true 4K gaming. Since then, a bunch of details about the console has been revealed in parts, one of which includes the 4K upscaling of the current-gen Xbox One games. Popular gaming outlet Digital Foundry, which also revealed the specs for the console, have now thrown a light on the company's promise showing Forza Motorsport 6 Apex upscaled to 4K.
While the publication couldn't share much, they did manage to give us a sneak peek with the snapshot below:
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Microsoft's first-party IP, the Forza series has been instrumental in pushing the resolution game forward for the platform, and this seems to be an extension of that. Forzatech, an internal software that helps Turn 10 studios test out experimental features such as Direct3D 12 [on PC], allowed the developers and Microsoft to collaborate on how to go about their objective. The current Xbox One game engines were optimized and refined using the PIX (Performance Investigator for Xbox) tool that enabled the Redmond company to shape the design of Scorpio's processor. Then, Turn 10 sent out "multiple sets of profiling data" to the hardware team to run on their emulators even before an actual hardware was built.
Chris Tector, Studio Software Architect at Turn 10 Studios explained:
"We provided a ton of data with ForzaTech, where we actually rendered different stress scenes at different resolutions - 720p, 1080p, 4K - and then stressed different points in the engine: anisotropic filtering, multi-sampling, pushing heavy LODs through, just to try to get a feel for where the different bottlenecks were."
Forzatech was able to scale the game in accordance with Scorpio's architecture in just two days, without the need of console-specific optimizations. Tector added that having a developer in the room, even in the planning stage, "said a lot about the Xbox organization" and it seems to be targeting with the console. The company has stated that they want to win developers back with Scorpio, and by the looks of it, they might actually get there.
Digital Foundry did a deep-dive into the Forza's 4K saga in the video below:
Turn 10 is already working on the seventh iteration of their successful series, which will run 4K on Scorpio out of the box along with a slew of other titles. The upcoming console is certainly off to a great start but, all eyes will be on what the corporation has to offer come June 11.
Source: Eurogamer
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