Microsoft started to ship its latest development kits for video game studios last month and now the company has outlined its different features to the public via a brand new video. The Scorpio Development Kit is a powerful new machine that has been purposely built for game developers to make it easier for them to create new games for the upcoming new console. The features are slightly different the actual retail version, but it does give fans an idea of what will be coming.
Built for developers
In the recently released video from Xbox, which was published on social media and on YouTube, Xbox engineer Kevin Gammill outlines the different features of the device they have created to help developers in building better games for the upcoming new gaming system.
Most the hardware and features they have built into the developer kit was based on the collected feedback the company had received from Xbox partners and those that were interested in creating titles for the more powerful gaming console.
Built for increased efficiency
The Scorpio Development Kit has been fitted with much more powerful hardware components compared to the consumer version. Gammill explains that the purpose for the beefier hardware is to give developers enough headroom to run their preliminary test builds. The extra power will allow programmers to more rapidly build a game without worrying too much about hardware requirements. Tuning the gaming to the lower specs of the actual console will come later after the game itself is already up and running.
Built for performance
The Dev Kit currently sports a much more powerful processor than the commercial version with 4 more compute units. The device also sports 24 GB of GDDR5 RAM, which is 12 GB more than the amount found on the actual Xbox Scorpio console. The kit has also been fitted with an additional 1TB of solid state storage.
Additionally, devs also have access to a small display in front of the device, which can be used to show important information such as frames per second, performance figures, specific lines of codes, and other data.
To help developers decrease the time in the transfer of game builds from PCs to the dev kit, the device also comes with an Xbox Transfer peripheral that allows transfer speeds of up to 450Mbps.
This drastically reduces the time it takes to get a build to and from PCs, which in turn will cut the development time significantly.
Microsoft is expected to reveal more details regarding the actual Xbox Scorpio console at the upcoming 2017 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) event happening next week.
