Don't Buy Scorpio If You Don't Have 4K, Says Microsoft Boss

[Stewie Plisken]

Whoever is at the head of marketing at Xbox has got to be fired. How are they going to sell Xbones to people who don't already have the console?
Consider myself. I have a PS4, Xbox 360 and first generation PS3 at the moment (the one with 4 USB ports and native PS2 hardware). I also have a gaming PC that I'll be upgrading within the next few months. I have a decent 40 inch 1080p TV.
So...how are you going to convince me to buy an Xbox?
Should I buy an Xbox now? No, I say to myself. There's announcements of two new boxes coming out relatively soon.
Which one should I buy?
The Slim? Why should I get that one, when there's a new more powerful box coming next year that'll obsolete that?
Scorpio? But as Spencer says, I'll need a 4K TV and while I do like better resolutions, that's not at the top of my list of things to buy.
Given that the Xbone has sold like crap, what exactly are they doing to try and get people who don't currently have an Xbone to buy?

If you have a gaming PC, you shouldn't buy a Scorpio. Even by what Microsoft is claiming to be doing with these new systems, it's the XBOX S they're trying to sell you. It's low-cost and, in theory, it will still play all the same games albeit at lower res/performance. So, essentially, you should stick to your PC and maybe upgrade to Win10 to play the cross-platform stuff at the best performance, while spending 300 bucks on an S just to experience the titles that won't come out on the PC.

Of course that's all speculation at this point and purchasing habits will largely rely on the how much the Scorpio actually costs; but it will probably be quite a bit of money. Certainly considerably more than the XBone's launching price.

Having said that, why you should buy an XBOX at all and not just save up money for an Occulus or a Vive for your PC, when more than likely it will be a better long-term investment than a measly XBOne that you'll rarely use, I don't know.

 

[RikuoAmero]

Whoever is at the head of marketing at Xbox has got to be fired. How are they going to sell Xbones to people who don't already have the console?
Consider myself. I have a PS4, Xbox 360 and first generation PS3 at the moment (the one with 4 USB ports and native PS2 hardware). I also have a gaming PC that I'll be upgrading within the next few months. I have a decent 40 inch 1080p TV.
So...how are you going to convince me to buy an Xbox?
Should I buy an Xbox now? No, I say to myself. There's announcements of two new boxes coming out relatively soon.
Which one should I buy?
The Slim? Why should I get that one, when there's a new more powerful box coming next year that'll obsolete that?
Scorpio? But as Spencer says, I'll need a 4K TV and while I do like better resolutions, that's not at the top of my list of things to buy.
Given that the Xbone has sold like crap, what exactly are they doing to try and get people who don't currently have an Xbone to buy?

If you have a gaming PC, you shouldn't buy a Scorpio. Even by what Microsoft is claiming to be doing with these new systems, it's the XBOX S they're trying to sell you. It's low-cost and, in theory, it will still play all the same games albeit at lower res/performance. So, essentially, you should stick to your PC and maybe upgrade to Win10 to play the cross-platform stuff at the best performance, while spending 300 bucks on an S just to experience the titles that won't come out on the PC.

Of course that's all speculation at this point and purchasing habits will largely rely on the how much the Scorpio actually costs; but it will probably be quite a bit of money. Certainly considerably more than the XBone's launching price.

Having said that, why you should buy an XBOX at all and not just save up money for an Occulus or a Vive for your PC, when more than likely it will be a better long-term investment than a measly XBOne that you'll rarely use, I don't know.

That's precisely it. I have literally no reason at all to get an Xbox, no matter which model. I have Win 10 already on all my machines. I've got a Samsung Gear VR, so I've tested out VR and found it to be quite intriguing. An Xbone quite literally does nothing I can't already do on any of my current machines.

 

[MiskWisk]

And add another mark in favour of the theory that Microsoft's PR department has been infiltrated by Sony.

 

[Baresark]

So... the way this sounds is that it's going to upscale to 4k... and probably struggle to hit 60 FPS. Boy, they sure have set themselves a low bar. I can say, with confidence as a member of the PC gaming master race, they are not actually going to be able to do what they say. I played GTA5 at 4K on my buddies rig... and he had a 980ti at the time, and it still struggled. There is no way they are releasing a product that can natively do 4K and get good frame rates... not unless they are throwing the equivalent of a 1080 in there, which I very much doubt they are.

 

[votemarvel]

But as Spencer says, I'll need a 4K TV and while I do like better resolutions, that's not at the top of my list of things to buy.
Given that the Xbone has sold like crap, what exactly are they doing to try and get people who don't currently have an Xbone to buy?

He's only said that because they don't want people to stop buying Xbox One's or the new Slim.

Think of downsampling on a PC, where the game runs at a higher resolution, but is made to show on a lower resolution monitor. That's what will happen with your 1080p TV and the 4k Scorpio.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

The only reason I'll get a console these days is to get a blu-ray player...

Can the Wii-U do that? Though, I suppose I've waited this long, I could just wait for whatever NX turns into.

Haven't cared about consoles since the Gamecube so I'm in a minority here....

 

[ScrabbitRabbit]

People saying that they think the games will run the same even on a 1080p screen because of framerate caps are almost certainly wrong.

I dunno if anyone else here ever had to play a PS3 or 360 on an SDTV but the performance is literally exactly the same because the game is rendering at the exact same resolution, it's just resized to fit (usually poorly) on the SD screen. The Scorpio is likely to be the same. It won't detect that you're playing on a 1080p TV, it'll just render at 4K anyway.

6 Tflops of GPU performance might be enough to get the same framerates at 4K that we see on the Xbox One right now, given current graphical standards but it's gonna be a bit of a push. 4K is demanding as all fuckery, even on older games.

 

[Chefsbrian]

I just don't see how they will possibly make it an affordable console though. I also don't know why the hell they think that 4k is the goal they should be going for. 4k has very small adoption among even the PC enthusiast crowd because the cost is so massive for a relatively small upgrade. After all, textures are designed with the intent to look pretty good at 1080 with modern titles. If you got a 4k display of the same size, you'll have a crisper version of the same image. If you end up with a gigantic 4k display, you'll end up with a blurry texture being rendered with very crisp edges and geometry. Character models tend to be higher res, and look great in my experience, but world textures don't usually take the transition too nicely.

Hell, just accounting for the memory overhead of textures designed for 4k, both in RAM and storage on the disk is gonna bring problems. RAM's cheap enough to get by, but Blu-Rays have a max capacity that modern games 50gb downloads indicate is already topped off. We might see disk swapping mid-game return.

This is all just conjecture, but all in all the Scorpio just sounds like a really stupid idea, aiming at a miniscule market without putting forward much appeal to the majority customer base. You can't just turn console users into enthusiasts by offering them a really expensive machine. A large number of gamers are casual in the sense that this isn't a primary hobby, and doubling down against their wallets is probably just gonna make them opt to skip.

 

[Roxas1359]

The only reason I'll get a console these days is to get a blu-ray player...

Can the Wii-U do that? Though, I suppose I've waited this long, I could just wait for whatever NX turns into.

Haven't cared about consoles since the Gamecube so I'm in a minority here....

Wii U doesn't have a Blu-ray player inside it. Well it does, but it's a modified one to play the special type of Bluray discs that the Wii U has. Can't play Blu-ray movies on a Wii U but I wish you could. Plus it'd be cheaper just to buy a Blu-ray player at this point man.

 

[Davroth]

Why would anyone buy a Scorpio after then announced that all the big games they announced come out on Windows 10 as well? Just buy a PC. At least when you dump a bunch of money into a PC, you are getting high resolution and an unlocked framerate.

 

[votemarvel]

People saying that they think the games will run the same even on a 1080p screen because of framerate caps are almost certainly wrong.

I dunno if anyone else here ever had to play a PS3 or 360 on an SDTV but the performance is literally exactly the same because the game is rendering at the exact same resolution, it's just resized to fit (usually poorly) on the SD screen. The Scorpio is likely to be the same. It won't detect that you're playing on a 1080p TV, it'll just render at 4K anyway.

It's certainly possible, Microsoft did block the Xbox One from displaying a 1080i image after all.

But stopping the Scorpio from displaying on 1080p devices would be madness. 1080p is the standard at the moment and I don't see a massive amount of people rushing out and getting 4k televisions just because they exist.

If Microsoft cut 1080p display functions from the Scorpio then they cut the people who may buy a Scorpio by a huge number. I don't think they'd do that. Then again I didn't expect them to release three versions of the Xbox One containing different hardware either, so what do I know.

 

[shrekfan246]

Why would anyone buy a Scorpio after then announced that all the big games they announced come out on Windows 10 as well? Just buy a PC. At least when you dump a bunch of money into a PC, you are getting high resolution and an unlocked framerate.

You say that, but... [http://store.steampowered.com/curator/9393382-The-Framerate-Police/]

Also, it's always worth noting that Microsoft's games will be exclusive to the Windows Store, which is pretty much the most restricted digital distribution platform that's yet been designed. It's inherently meant to keep the end-user from being capable of modifying anything, so games that have locked framerates or graphical bugs that you might need to dig around in the files to fix manually? Yep, can't do it with a Windows Store title. Quantum Break, in fact, seemed to do the same resolution upscaling thing on PC that it did on the Xbox One, and inexplicably had a sort of Vsync functionality that locked the game's framerate to 5/6ths of your monitor's native refresh rate. How could the industrious PC community fix that? Well, they couldn't.

 

[Callate]

My suspicion is that they're trying to promote an element of, "Of course, if you're really one of the elite hard-core..." I mean, there has to be something to nudge people over the $500 price-point hump.

Not that I'd expect that to fare all that much better than "If you're backwards compatible, you're really backwards."

I still feel like we're not getting a heckuva lot of evidence that Microsoft understands what their customers actually want. I suspect that longer load times and greater use of their hard disk space- even with a larger hard drive to compensate- so they can see a few extra reflections in Master Chief's helmet isn't really it.

 

[Davroth]

Why would anyone buy a Scorpio after then announced that all the big games they announced come out on Windows 10 as well? Just buy a PC. At least when you dump a bunch of money into a PC, you are getting high resolution and an unlocked framerate.

You say that, but... [http://store.steampowered.com/curator/9393382-The-Framerate-Police/]

Also, it's always worth noting that Microsoft's games will be exclusive to the Windows Store, which is pretty much the most restricted digital distribution platform that's yet been designed. It's inherently meant to keep the end-user from being capable of modifying anything, so games that have locked framerates or graphical bugs that you might need to dig around in the files to fix manually? Yep, can't do it with a Windows Store title. Quantum Break, in fact, seemed to do the same resolution upscaling thing on PC that it did on the Xbox One, and inexplicably had a sort of Vsync functionality that locked the game's framerate to 5/6ths of your monitor's native refresh rate. How could the industrious PC community fix that? Well, they couldn't.

If they purposefully break their games, don't buy them. It's pretty well known that games get gutted for consoles all the damn time anyway. Just don't play ball.

 

[shrekfan246]

Why would anyone buy a Scorpio after then announced that all the big games they announced come out on Windows 10 as well? Just buy a PC. At least when you dump a bunch of money into a PC, you are getting high resolution and an unlocked framerate.

You say that, but... [http://store.steampowered.com/curator/9393382-The-Framerate-Police/]

Also, it's always worth noting that Microsoft's games will be exclusive to the Windows Store, which is pretty much the most restricted digital distribution platform that's yet been designed. It's inherently meant to keep the end-user from being capable of modifying anything, so games that have locked framerates or graphical bugs that you might need to dig around in the files to fix manually? Yep, can't do it with a Windows Store title. Quantum Break, in fact, seemed to do the same resolution upscaling thing on PC that it did on the Xbox One, and inexplicably had a sort of Vsync functionality that locked the game's framerate to 5/6ths of your monitor's native refresh rate. How could the industrious PC community fix that? Well, they couldn't.

If they purposefully break their games, don't buy them. It's pretty well known that games get gutted for consoles all the damn time anyway. Just don't play ball.

I'm glad to see we agree?

By design, Windows 10 games on the Windows Store are going to be completely up to the whim of the developer/publisher as to whether they actually work or not, so responding to this by saying, "all of the games are coming to Windows 10 so just buy a PC" isn't really that helpful. There are many reasons one might recommend purchasing a PC, but I personally wouldn't say that the Windows Store is one of them.

 

[Davroth]

My original point was more about the mixed messages they were sending in their press conference, less about the actual practibility of it.

 

[Dollabillyall]

Going to be nice food for the PC gaming master race when the scorpio comes out and costs as much as a 4K-capable PC.

 

[deadish]

This sounds an awful lot like it's still going to be limited to 30FPS, even at 1080p.

The only difference being that it can run at 4K resolution, with the same graphical settings as the Xbox One.

I think it's because frame rate is tied to gameplay mechanics and balance on consoles. It's a luxury of console development to be able to tune gameplay so precisely.

 

[Hawk eye1466]

Don't worry, I wasn't planning to buy any of the hardware microsoft was pushing this year.