The moment the rumours about the Project Scarlett having a cheaper option surfaced again, it started bringing up more possibilities about the Lockhart codenamed next-gen Xbox…

„I’ve heard some scepticism from third-party developers, who are, like, “Hey, it’s a pain in the ass to ship on multiple hardware SKUs [stock keeping units – in this case, you could say different versions of a product – the ed.]. Second of all, this is going to hamper us, because Microsoft is requiring us to ship on this lower-powered version, that has the equivalent graphical power of a PlayStation 4 Pro.” It’s worth noting, that is has a higher-end CPU and a solid-state drive, and other next-gen features, so it’s not safe to compare it directly to the PlayStation 4 Pro.

The way it’s been described to me…I think next-gen Xbox [Lockhart] is going to have significantly less RAM, but the CPU makes a big difference, especially when it comes to framerate. The SSD makes a huge difference when it comes to loading times. So, I think what [devs] can do a lot of the time is knock down the texture quality, take a hit on the resolution, but you don’t have to sacrifice framerate as much,” Jason Schreier, Kotaku’s writer, said on the newest Kotaku Splitscreen podcast. Schreier also says that both Sony and Microsoft aim for a GPU performance that is „more powerful than the graphics cards, like the RTX 2080, that are on the market today.”

As a reminder, the stronger Project Scarlett is codenamed Anaconda, while the weaker one is Lockart. If it’s true that Microsoft forces devs to make their games work on two separate Scarlett models that could launch at the same time next year (we wonder if Lockhart will skip the Blu-ray drive?), then Sony will have an advantage purely by the fact that (initially, at least) devs won’t have to consider developing for two SKUs.

It could be an issue for Microsoft early next-gen… unless they pull out the price card.

Source: WCCFTech

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