Community Post-it Wall

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Scorpio spec reveal was today and it did not disappoint. Microsoft went big and gave the scoop to none other than DigitalFoundry. They are legends of hardware analyst and the fact they came out impressed is a very good sign. We got a peek at the hardware itself too minus it's shell and wow, that thing is gonna be small for it's power... looks like even smaller than the One S. It's not gonna be Ryzen and Vega, CPU will continue to be jaguar and GPU polaris... tho both are cranked up quite a bit. These will be combined with a custom co-processor that's specifically for handling DX12... it's like giving DX12 it's own hardware level chip which should help the CPU tremendously. It'll have 12 GB of DDR5 RAM, 4 for the OS and 8 for games... this is up from 5 on the Xbox One. 1TB HDD, hopefully 7200rpm but haven't seen anything yet. UHD blu-ray and all the same ports One S had.

SRAM is gone which was expected and apparently Microsoft has done the leg work in making sure this isn't a problem when running Xbox One titles on Scorpio without any patches from Devs. How? Dunno. Voodoo magic I guess. All Xbox One games and 360 games are expected to get performance boosts automatically, devs will also be able to enable 4k and better visuals via patches if they wish. Newer first party titles are expected to support 4k out of the box, older ones are expected to get patches.

For 1080p users aka most of us. 4k sub sampling will be available to make the game sharper instead of forcing 1080p. Dashboard will also render at 4k now. For anyone reading this that isn't aware, Scorpio while new hardware is still considered part of Xbox One family. All accessories, games etc are compatible and thus far Scorpio won't have any exclusive titles... it will simply run games with higher settings, resolutions and possibly framerates... tho I'd assume in multiplayer framerates will be required to be the same. Also Scorpio is it's code name and sadly very likely to change. It will launch some time late 2017 and pricing will be "premium" whatever that means... best guess is $399 to $599 range.

 

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Not a new day yet so can't award any points, however feel free to keep posting.

 

Needs to be longer if you want points.

 

Xbox Spring Sale is now officially coming! Looks like it'll be another great one. Super glad Steam has pushed the trend of big sales on digital games... the consoles never use to have all that great of sales, now at least on the Xbox side they have a few big ones each year with real discounts.

Found a new mobile game to play called Tiny Rails... am now super addicted to it... who doesn't love trains? Really really enjoying it though and haven't had to spend anything yet. Seems the game world is absolutely huge too so I could see playing it for some time. Anyone interested in a hands off/hands on train game might wanna check it out, should run on just about anything. It's a super chill game.

 

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Looks like Nintendo Switch stock may finally be starting to normalize, noticing on tracking sites that pages are staying up for a few minutes rather than near instant sell out. Larger stocks are lasting more decent amounts of time too. Comments have gone way down on these sites as well. All in all demand still seems really high but it good that people are able to a little more reasonably pick them up. Only time will tell if Switch can keep up its demand though, as good as it's been so far... it's only one month.

 

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Some news dropped today that Scorpio will support Freesync. This is kinda huge as Freesync is fantastic. I currently have a small range freesync monitor and got to test how it works with a cheap RX460 an it's quite the change. Now with a small range and a low end card... it was pretty hard to stay in the range but when I did it was no joke the smoothest gameplay experience I've ever had. The best example I could find was GTA5, driving around the city became so smooth it was insane. If it wasn't for the RX460 I have being obnoxiously loud I'd seriously consider using it over the more powerful GTX 1050 Ti solely for Freesync.

Scorpio should be a pretty solid lock at 30 or 60FPS... 30 ain't gonna be supported on very many Freesync monitors but being able to maintain at or close to 60FPS at all times would work really well on all of them. This would turn an already smooth 60FPS into an ultra smooth, tear free 60FPS. As a racing fan... it goes a long way to improving immersion, it's just so dang smooth.

I'm super glad Microsoft opted to support Freesync, sadly most people won't see the benefits as no TVs support it yet and many of the monitors use DisplayPort... which Scorpio doesn't have but it's a nice thing for the future. It could also play a role with HDR... but I'm not going into that here. Freesync adds very little to the cost of the monitor so it's likely we'll see it on more and more of them going forward.

 

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