Digital Foundry is reporting that they have got their meat hooks on some freshly leaked Xbox Scorpio spec.

The report is tech heavy, and my eyes began to close over when trying to read it, because I’m not a patient man, but the key takeaway has to do with the Scorpio’s ESRAM, or rather,  according to the report, the lack of it.

Okay, so what’s the hullabaloo about the ESRAM black magic? Well, according to a Microsoft whitepaper obtained by Digital Foundry:

“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.”

In a nutshell, the RAM on the Scorpio will be faster, and better suited for Ultra HD, but developers are still going to have to stay within the parameters of ESRAM, so that games are compatible across Microsoft platforms.

I feel that this is a possible hindrance and limiting the full potential of what the Scorpio will be capable of achieving. I also wonder how long Microsoft will mandate this limitation. I have a feeling that at some point, they are going to let the developers have at it.

Project Scorpio is set to launch holiday 2017 and has been touted by Microsoft as being the most powerful console to date.