00:00Hi, it's Larry here of Xbox Live's Major Nelson.
00:03Yes, Project Scorpio is shipping later this year,
00:05but right now we're shipping another console to our developer friends.
00:10This is going to enable them to create great content, games, for you, the gamers.
00:15We're going to catch up with Kevin Gamble from the Xbox Engineering team to tell us more.
00:20Kevin, thanks for joining us.
00:21I want to talk to you about the Scorpio Dev Kit.
00:24Why did we do a Scorpio Dev Kit?
00:26So, Larry, when we went and kicked off Project Scorpio,
00:30we actually went on the road and talked to our third-party development partners
00:33and talked to them about really what they wanted in Dev Kit.
00:35It's important to the team, kind of the way we think about the development process,
00:39is to get the tools out of the way of the developer
00:41and really enable them to create the game they wanted to create
00:44and kind of in the vision that they wanted to create it in
00:47and make sure our tools are out of the way.
00:49And the Dev Kit is really an instantiation of the feedback we got
00:53from our third-party development partners and first-party development partners.
00:57Can you tell us a little bit about game development?
00:59Why do we need a separate piece of hardware for game development?
01:03That's a good question, Larry.
01:04One of the pieces of feedback we heard back from our partners was that
01:08many of them like to come in, well, kind of a higher spec
01:11than what the retail kits would be.
01:13And so it was important to provide kind of some additional headroom
01:16for the developers to come in, kind of so they could come in higher
01:18and then tune lower as they got closer to shipping their game.
01:21And that kind of enables them some faster iteration times
01:24where they can just get the game up and running
01:26and then tune later as they get closer to ship.
01:29How is the Dev Kit different?
01:30I mean, physically it looks different.
01:32I see things on here that I haven't seen on Project Scorpio.
01:35So can you walk us through some of the differences?
01:37Absolutely.
01:37Certainly a lot more headroom.
01:38So to start with, it has four more CU's than the retail kit.
01:42It comes with 12 more gigs of RAM,
01:43so it's got 24 total gigabytes of GDR5 RAM,
01:47and it's got an additional one terabyte SSD hard disk drive,
01:51which lets game developers leverage that to really improve
01:54just what we call development iteration times,
01:56or kind of quick inner loop.
01:57So they can quickly debug something, for example,
02:00deploy it to the kit, get it up and running,
02:02test their kit, and then redo that over and over and over again
02:04as quick as possible.
02:06Kevin, the kit looks completely different from Project Scorpio.
02:10I see different buttons.
02:11I see a different display, some other things in the back here.
02:14What's going on here?
02:15So all this is feedback we heard back from both our first
02:18and third-party development partners.
02:19This is the kit that even the Xbox platform team developers want to use.
02:23It is so good from the inside and from the outside.
02:27For example, the front panel display and the five programmable buttons.
02:31We ship with a number of what I'll call canned or samples for those,
02:35but those are programmable by the developer to do anything they want.
02:39So you can imagine a scenario in the lab where they have a headless scenario
02:42where they don't want to have a monitor for every dev kit.
02:46They can use these buttons to basically change the gameplay.
02:49I've even seen some developers use like mini, mini versions of their games
02:53so they can kind of see what the console is doing.
02:55I hope we actually have kind of an open-source ecosystem with this eventually in the long run.
03:01But game developers can do anything they want with it.
03:03I've seen frame rate, as you mentioned.
03:05I've seen mini versions of the game.
03:06I've even seen people create games specifically for the front panel display just for fun.
03:11Yeah, is it running Snake yet?
03:13That's all that really matters.
03:14Snake is running, and I can show that to you.
03:15I also noticed around the back, it looks very similar to a Scorpio unit,
03:20but there's an additional network port.
03:22Why do developers need that?
03:24Yeah, it was important to us, Larry, that we have every port that is in the retail kit
03:28so they can actually test true retail scenarios, including HDMI in.
03:32But we did add a second NIC to allow developers to essentially monitor their network traffic on the main NIC
03:39and have all their debug traffic on the second NIC so the two wouldn't necessarily collide.
03:43Kevin, one thing about the consoles is you can now stack them,
03:46and that may not sound like a big deal, but it actually is to developers.
03:50Yeah, that was really actually hard for the hardware engineering team
03:52because in previous dev kits, the airflow and the cooling was actually through the top,
03:57making it impossible for game developers to stack these unless they actually created,
04:01and I've seen this in a few studios, some level of kind of buffer between the dev kits.
04:05Like a riser.
04:06Exactly.
04:06I've been to game studios where I've actually seen Legos kind of in between the two dev kits.
04:10So that was a piece of feedback we heard,
04:11and we changed the way the airflow comes in.
04:13So it basically comes in the back and out the sides,
04:15and that allows the kits to be stacked 10 high.
04:17So, for example, Turn 10 Studios has a great lab setup,
04:20and you just go in there and they have tons of Xbox dev kits stacked up to 10 high
04:26with only one monitor kind of controlling all of them.
04:28Kevin, I want to talk about Dolphin.
04:30For those of us that have been in the Xbox team for a long time,
04:33it's a major moment when Dolphin appears on the console.
04:37Can you give us some history of Dolphin and how it appears on this XD kit?
04:39Absolutely, Larry. Dolphin has a lot of sentimental value for me.
04:43As we start a project, one of the first things we actually start to implement is Dolphin on console,
04:49and we've actually done this since the original Xbox.
04:51We've done it for the original Xbox.
04:53We did it for Xbox 360.
04:54We've done it for the original Xbox One,
04:57and now we've done it with Project Scorpio and its development kit.
05:00It's a way of bringing up the graphics subsystem
05:02and proving out some of the timings and performance we want
05:06in a kind of a neat, fun way, which you'll actually see in a minute
05:08because we actually have Dolphin hooked up with the front panel display on the dev kit.
05:12We actually can add Dolphins, delete Dolphins, just do wireframe Dolphins.
05:16You'll see it in a couple minutes.
05:17Kevin, I also noticed there's this additional piece of hardware hanging off the back here.
05:21What is that for?
05:22That's what we call the Xbox transfer device,
05:24and one of the pieces of feedback we heard from our partners was
05:27iteration times are super important,
05:29and part of that iteration time is kind of deploying your build from a PC to the console,
05:34and what the Xbox transfer device facilitates is speeds up to 450 megabytes a second,
05:40so a deployment can actually happen in less than four minutes,
05:43where traditionally without that device,
05:44it would take for a full build potentially up to 20 minutes,
05:47so it really helps them iterate quicker on their game title.
05:51Sounds like you've checked a lot of boxes for developers,
05:53and that can mean really one thing,
05:56which is great games coming to Project Scorpio.
05:58You got it, Larry.
05:59You're absolutely right.
06:01Feedback so far as we've sent dev kits out to our partners has been fantastic,
06:05and I can't wait to see what they have at E3.
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