XBOX SCORPIO       XBOX ONE S       XBOX ONE           PS4 PRO            PS4

At the heart of Project Scorpio is an all-new AMD GPU, which features 40 "customised" Radeon compute units (compared to just 12 on the Xbox One and Xbox One S) clocked at an impressive 1172MHz. That's a substantial increase over Xbox One GPU's 853MHz clock speeds, and even the PS4 Pro's 911MHz. Microsoft has doubled the amount of shader engines and render back-ends, and quadrupled the GPU L2 cache size, which it claims has boosted the GPU fill-rate by 2.7x. That's more than enough, it says, for native 4K gaming.

The new GPU—which still lives on the same 360mm-square die as the CPU—is paired with 12GB of GDDR5 memory, marking a move away from the DDR3/ESRAM pairing of the Xbox One towards the unified memory architecture favoured by Sony's PlayStation 4. In theory, latency will be higher compared to the Xbox One's ESRAM, but Microsoft says that "in terms of aggregate performance, the improved bandwidth and improved GPU performance means we don't hit any issues."

That memory is divided up into 12 1GB chips, each of which sports a 32-bit interface to create a 384-bit bus. In total, there's 326GB/s of memory bandwidth, which is substantially higher than the 204GB/s of the Xbox One and the 218GB/s of the PS4 Pro. Indeed, it's even higher than AMD's own RX 480, and higher than Nvidia's top-of-the-line GTX 1080.