Game Tech News

The rumblings were true — Microsoft is releasing a major mid-cycle update to the Xbox One. Dubbed “Project Scorpio,” this new console aims at delivering enough horsepower to support 4K gaming and virtual reality while maintaining compatibility for the entire catalog of Xbox One releases. It’s currently scheduled for a Q4 2017 release, but what will that mean for existing Xbox One users?

In big announcement on Microsoft’s E3 stage, we got teased with a few very impressive numbers. First and foremost, the 6 TFLOPS bullet point was hit hard, and with good reason. Reportedly, the original Xbox One hits about 1.32 TFLOPS, the PS4 lands at a slightly beefier 1.84 TFLOPS, and the last big leak for the PS4K claims 4.14 TFLOPS.
To be clear, measuring the floating-point operations per second isn’t the be-all, end-all of gauging the performance of a platform, but this 6 TFLOPS number is Microsoft’s way of signaling to the public that they’re taking performance very seriously this time around.


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Microsoft announced two major console initiatives today at its E3 press conference. The Xbox One Scorpio, billed as the most powerful console ever, will arrive for holidays 2017, but the new Xbox One S will launch in August, with a significant number of updated features of its own. This version of the console is the typical type of update we’ve come to expect from companies like Microsoft and Sony — improved features and capabilities, but without any fundamental changes to the CPU or GPU.

The Xbox One S is 40% smaller than the Xbox One, with a starting price of $300 rather than the $500 that the original Xbox debuted at in 2013. The power supply is integrated into all versions of the Xbox One S chassis, making it the first Xbox to offer this feature. The 500GB version will sell for $300, a 1TB flavor will be $350, and a 2TB Xbox One will cost $400. Frankly, customers are better off buying the 500GB flavor and adding their own external drive. Internal drive upgrades are possible on the Xbox One, but since the platform doesn’t exactly make that easy, it’s probably simpler for most people to just use an external HDD (a 3TB external WD drive is $114).

This new version of the Xbox One will also support 4K video and Ultra HD Blu-ray, with an updated Xbox One controller with a textured back, Bluetooth support, and extended range. The system also includes an IR blaster, which allows for TV control without a Kinect unit. Both the controller and a vertical stand for the Xbox One will supposedly ship separately from the $299 unit (no word on whether updated controllers are included in the $349 or $399 platforms or not).

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The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim is a five-year-old game that’s still receiving new mods, original content, and feature tweaks courtesy of its huge player base. It’s not unusual to see articles detailing the best mods and graphics updates for the game still being published today, even though the game is practically doddering. Bethesda itself is apparently getting in on the action, with a full-scale overhaul of Skyrim’s graphics and what looks like a full DX11 update.

The company released the news as part of its E3 2016 unveil; details are in the video below. We’ve also extracted some of the before and after screenshots from both the Xbox and PlayStation versions of the game, in case you can’t watch the video or don’t care to do so. The first section of the video deals with new Fallout 4 mods; skip to 3:14 to see the Skyrim section.

Let’s start things off by comparing two different screenshots from the video. The first shot is from the PlayStation 3 version of the game as compared with the PS4 flavor. In both of the screenshots, the new version of the game is on the left, while the old variant is on the right.



Ambient detail and ground clutter have both improved a great deal — trees are more detailed, the lighting model is significantly different, and the grass looks more like what you might find growing in a field and less like a Chia Pet.

The next screen shot is from the Xbox 360 as compared with the Xbox One.



Again, foliage and lighting are much improved, but this screen shot gives us a good comparison of ground textures, not just generated ground cover. As you can see, there’s virtually no difference at all. The “remastered” version of Skyrim is using the same textures as the original game.


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Oculus’ policies and practices have been under fire almost since the Rift launch. The company’s decision to launch into retail stores without first filling preorders sat poorly with many of its most ardent fans, while its decision to break the Revive compatibility project by introducing DRM to the Oculus Store flew directly in the face of earlier comments by founder Palmer Luckey. Now the company is in the hot seat again over its attempts to secure paid exclusives for the Rift.


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By all accounts, the E3 show floor was conspicuously quiet this year, but that didn’t stop the major publishers and platform holders from showcasing scores of big-budget AAA games on stage. Small indie devs still received a decent amount of attention and praise, but it seems that the companies with press events were focused on driving home the fact that they have some real heavy-hitters lined up for this year and next.


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The GTX 970 has fallen to as low as $239 on NewEgg, down from a pre-Pascal price of ~$320. Zotac currently has the least expensive*GTX 970 on the market, but there are cards from Asus at nearly the same price. While AMD’s RX 480 is coming to market in the near-term future, the GTX 970 is still a formidable card at that price point — particularly if you’re already a Team Green fan, and especially if you already own one GTX 970 and are curious about using SLI. Nvidia will presumably release a Pascal-based GTX 1060, but we don’t know anything about that card’s specifications or price yet.



The GTX 970’s frame times can spike far above the GTX 980 in certain scenarios.

If you do opt for a GTX 970, be aware that the card’s split memory pool of 3.5GB+512MB makes it a good fit for games at 1440p or below. While it’s comparatively rare for the memory pool to cause issues in shipping titles, there have been some documented cases of unusual behavior when running in SLI mode at high resolutions and detail levels.


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A few posts on TechPowerUp have highlighted issues with GTX 1080 and 1070 cards from Asus and MSI. Specifically, both vendors have been caught shipping cards to reviewers that were configured for overclocking mode out of the box, while retail cards are shipping at base clocks by default.

In this case, the clock speed differences are very small, at roughly 1.5%, which means they’re only likely to produce ~1% of difference, if that.




Asus responded to PC Perspective’s inquiry on this issue by noting that reviewers and buyers alike can adjust GPU clock speeds via its GPU Tweak II utility, and that “The press samples for the ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1080 OC and ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1070 OC cards are set to “OC Mode” by default. To save media time and effort, OC mode is enabled by default as we are well aware our graphics cards will be reviewed primarily on maximum performance.”

The truth is, vendors have been pulling tricks like this for well over a decade. In the old days, they’d overclock CPU buses slightly, pushing a 133MHz base clock up to 136MHz. On a 2.13GHz CPU with a 16x base clock, that’s enough for a roughly 2% clock speed increase. Other scenarios have been more egregious — we’ve seen motherboards that would automatically enable optimized CPU overclocking settings when XMP memory profiles were enabled. In this particular case, that meant all CPU cores were set to run at the maximum Turbo frequency normally reserved for a single-threaded scenario. Optimizations like this can impact measured performance by significant amounts, much more than the 2% we mentioned earlier.


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Virtual reality was a major topic at E3 this year, thanks to PC gaming’s renewed spotlight, Sony’s upcoming PlayStation VR, and Microsoft talking up VR capabilities as part of Project Scorpio. Nintendo of America’s CEO Reggie Fils-Aime isn’t interested in virtual reality, however — at least not yet.

“In my judgment, I think VR is a bit further out there for mainstream, mass market applications and applications that consumers can invest a lot of time in versus short snacks of entertainment,” Fils-Aime told Bloomberg.

“For us, we want to make sure that technology is mainstream,” Fils-Aime continued. “We want to make sure the technology represents strong value to the consumer… So the way we look at VR or even AR… for us the technology has to be at a point where it can be mainstream, and then it takes content creating companies like us to really make things that the consumer wants to experience, that they want to jump into the particular technology.”




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During last week’s E3 extravaganza, Nintendo finally dove deep on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The upcoming installment in the 30-year-old franchise rejects much of Nintendo’s recent history, and embraces a massive scope with complex gameplay systems. This is good news for fans who’ve fallen away from the series, but Nintendo might be asking too much from the Wii U’s limited hardware.

Nintendo streamed a significant chunk of the game last Tuesday, and E3 attendees were given the opportunity to play the game for themselves. We’ve only seen a sliver of the immense world Nintendo has promised, but the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Our sister site IGN named Zelda the game of the show, GameSpot called it one of the best games of E3 2016, and it even made our own top ten list. Nintendo has definitely dropped the ball these past few years, but they’re still capable of impressing even the most skeptical among us.

The new mechanics and the gorgeous art direction are exciting, and Nintendo deserves praise for stepping out of its comfort zone, but the E3 demo suffered from some serious performance problems. Digital Foundry analyzed the gameplay footage from Nintendo’s stream, and found that the frame rate was far from a locked 30fps. When you’re simply running around in the open world, the frame rate is reasonably stable. But the moment you start battling foes or setting fires, the game can drop into the low 20s.


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Growing up, the Mega Man franchise were the kinds of platform titles I wanted to be good at, but mostly wasn’t. We had an 80286/10 PC rather than any kind of console, which meant my time with games like Super Mario Bros or Mega Man was limited to visits with friends and family. Since its Kickstarter launch in 2013, I’ve kept an eye on Mighty No. 9, the supposed spiritual successor to Mega Man, to see whether or not the game would be worth playing.

Over the past few years, Mighty No. 9 has been mired in controversies of various sorts, from repeated game delays and lackluster demos, to outcry over the company’s decision to launch a second Kickstarter for an entirely new property before Mighty No. 9 had been released. The final game finally dropped this week, more than a year after its original April 2015 release date. Unfortunately, it’s not reviewing well, with an average rating of 54 according to OpenCritic.


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