In-Depth Look at Project Scorpio Dev Kit Reveals Console Details

Xbox Live's Larry Hryb (AKA Major Nelson) has caught up with Kevin Gammill from the Xbox engineering team to talk about the Project Scorpio dev kit and what makes it so unique. Xbox went to greath lengths in order to design a dev kit that makes it easier than ever to develop, test, and iterate on games in development for the retail version of Project Scorpio. See for yourself what makes it so unique in the video above.

While it's interesting to hear a little bit about what goes on behind the scenes when developers are fine-tuning their games for us, what you're more likely to get out of this video are a few small details about the retail version of Project Scorpio that we didn't yet know for certain. Though, to be clear, some of what we're about to point out could be Larry speaking too fast and not necessarily confirming anything, but his choice of words are very interesting.

At the 2:10 mark Larry says that the dev kit "looks completely different from Project Scorpio. I see different buttons, I see a different display..." The Project Scorpio dev kit has a small display panel on the front. In early images we saw that this panel was configured to show the FPS-count of the current software, but we've seen that it can display a vast variety of things.

Will the retail version of Project Scorpio have a front-facing display on the console as well? We noticed that Larry said that the dev kit has "a different display," perhaps indicating that the retail unit has a display as well. This would be the first home console with a functional display on the actual console itself (excepting the Nintendo Switch, of course).

Stating that it has different buttons also indicates that Project Scorpio's final design may include more than the typical power and eject buttons that we're used to. If this console is going to fully compatible with Xbox One games as well as future games capable of scaling up to 4K, maybe these buttons will switch between different performance modes similarly to what we see in the PS4 Pro?

It leaves us with a lot to chew on, but not for long. Next week Microsoft will be leaving it all on the stage during its E3 conference, and we'll finally get to see Project Scorpio for ourselves. Stay tuned to WWG for all of the latest coverage.