Microsoft Announces Xbox S, Project Scorpio

The biggest announcement at Microsoft’s E3 conference this morning was that the rumors were all true – a new slimmed down Xbox One dubbed the ‘Xbox One S’ is coming later this year. On top of that a much more powerful console, ‘Project Scorpio,’ is targeting a Holiday 2017 release.

Xbox One S will be 40% smaller than the Xbox One and offer High Dynamic Range gaming, 4K streaming video and UHD Blu-ray film playback. The 500 GB version of the console will cost $299 upon release with 1TB version priced at $350 and a limited edition 2TB version at $399.

The Scorpio is rumored to be slightly more powerful than the PS4 Neo and designed to run both games and media at 4K and 60hz, along with being able to handle VR support.

Microsoft is going back to proprietary GPU technology with a custom built processor that manages 6 teraflops and can read and transfer approximately 320 gigabytes per second on an octocore CPU.

That puts it behind the recently announced GTX 1080 PC graphics card specifically designed for VR and 4K gaming. That card offers gamers 9 teraflops of floating point precision performance.

Meanwhile Xbox confirms that games will be compatible between all three, so “no-one gets left behind”. We’ll see it for ourselves late next year.