Sony may have laid out a road map for the future of the PS4, launching the PS4 Pro a year before Xbox’s Scorpio, but Microsoft doesn’t see much reason to worry.
Speaking with Polygon, senior director of product management and planning at Xbox, Albert Penello, outlined why he sees the Scorpio will still come out on top. “I feel pretty good about the decisions we’ve made,” he says. “I feel good about what we’ve done with the Xbox One S. Both we and Sony are investing in 4K as the future of the console space, and we have a history of adding features to our hardware.”
For starters, the already released Xbox One S includes a 4K UHD Blu-ray player, which the PS4 Pro, let alone the PS4 Slim, does not. Microsoft has the “intention to deliver” the feature with the Scorpio as well. On top of that, the Scorpio GPU will weigh in at 6 teraflops of computing power, a straight advantage over the PS4 Pro’s 4.2 teraflop GPU.
“The performance delta will be obvious,” Penello says.
When it comes to how Microsoft’s next console will compare to the Pro’s $399 price tag, he is slightly less committal however. “We know it’s important to deliver an experience that demonstrates the power gap between [the PS4 Pro and Scorpio] at a price that makes sense to console gamers,” he says.
The PS4 Pro releases November 10. Even while Xbox One outsold the PS4 in the month of August, Sony is getting ready for the holiday push, explaining how to transfer saves to the PS4 Pro, and even how to tell if a game will benefit from the new hardware.