The Xbox Scorpio, the new console by Microsoft launching later this year in all regions, has yet to be detailed fully, with only rumors and leaks providing additional information. A new leak which has emerged online today seems to suggest that some things changed during the course of the month.

　　Earlier today, Digital Foundry published a report on the latest Xbox Scorpio leak, revealing that the Xbox One's ESRAM will be gone from Xbox Scorpio.

　　ESRAM remains essential to achieving high performance on both Xbox One and Xbox One S. However, Project Scorpio and PC are not provided with ESRAM. Because developers are not allowed to ship a Project Scorpio-only SKU, optimising for ESRAM remains critical to performance on Microsoft platforms."

　　The leaked whitepaper also provided some additional information on the Xbox Scorpio specs. Apparently, the console six teraflop GPU is still in, and other details suggest that the console's GPU architecture is as modern as AMD's Polaris line

　　There are other clues as to Scorpio's final hardware set-up within the whitepaper. The six teraflop GPU is once again confirmed, with the GPU's compute power rated at around 4.5 times the capabilities of Xbox One. Four times more L2 cache is also confirmed - a new detail that does not tell us that much, except that that the GPU architecture in Scorpio is at least as modern as AMD's Polaris line. Based on our discussions with Mark Cerny on PS4 Pro, we can reasonably assume that Microsoft can customise its GPU core just as Sony did, with access to Radeon roadmap features up to - and perhaps beyond - AMD's upcoming Vega architecture. Microsoft gives away little here, other than to confirm that delta colour compression (DCC) is a part of the Scorpio GPU feature set, just as it is in PS4 Pro.

　　The whitepaper also gives some hint on how developers can use the additional Xbox Scorpio power.

　　"We acknowledge that developers may not wish to spend all of the additional GPU resource of Project Scorpio on resolution, and this is not mandated. To make the best games possible, developers will inevitably spend GPU resource on other quality improvements such as higher fidelity shadows, reflections, texture filtering and lower draw distances. Another option developers might consider is frame-rate upscaling - running graphics at 60Hz but the CPU at 30Hz and interpolating animation."

　　The Xbox Scorpio launches sometime this year in all regions. We will keep you updated on the console as soon as more comes in on it, so stay tuned for all the latest news.