When it comes out, the Xbox Scorpio will be the most powerful console on the market. That’s the promise Microsoft made at E3 when it announced the followup to the Xbox One, and it seems likely that the company is going to be able to keep it. Consoles, however, are only part of this modern gaming equation, as the company that Windows built is also here to remind us. The Scorpio may be nearly five times as powerful as the Xbox One, but how does it compare to a gaming PC? Gamingbolt recently talked to CD Projekt Red’s Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz, who said that the Scorpio will be able to hang with the high-end PCs right now, and that it might even have been able to surpass them.
There’s a caveat here, in case you couldn’t tell from the headline. While Scorpio is on par with high-end machines today, it doesn’t come out for more than a year. And considering the pace at which we’ve seen advancements in graphics cards, it’s entirely possible that PCs will be outpacing the Scorpio by the time it hits shelves, and certainly shortly afterwards.
“New graphic cards are being released very often and more often than the new consoles being released,” he continued. “So I think it will put Scorpio on par with the PC is that we have at that point. But I think PC is growing so fast that it’ll outpace [Scorpio].”
And that’s the dance. Consoles are small, cheap, living-room friendly and standardized, but it’s just difficult for them to out muscle the rapidly developing world of PC. When a console first comes out it usually hits up towards the higher end of the graphics spectrum, but only for so long. That’s sort of what Microsoft and Sony are trying to combat by changing the concept of a console generation to allow for more frequent updates, but high-end PC will dominate the graphics game for the foreseeable future.