Besides a name and a picture, our tipster also had a lot to say about the internal components found in Prospero and its Microsoft counterpart, Project Scarlett. Our tipster communicated in an oblique fashion that left their messages more open to interpretation than we generally like. One thing was clear: the future consoles will have the “greatest compute jump in any console,” they said.
We’ve had a good look at the underlying architecture for the AMD processor already, so that’s not terribly surprising.
In terms of graphics performance, our tipster offered fuzzy details about how each console would handle ray tracing differently, but frankly, the statements were too hard to parse, so we won’t reprint them here.
Our tipster’s most interesting series of claims concerned the cameras included with the PS5 prototype and Project Scarlett. Thanks to Twitch, YouTube, and even Microsoft’s Mixer, video game streaming is a huge business right now. Lots and lots of people make money by streaming video of themselves playing games, sometimes for audiences of thousands of people. Consequently, high-quality camera support for consoles is practically required if Sony and Microsoft want to lure streamers to their platforms.
The PS4 and Xbox One both have streaming support, but it is not nearly as robust as the streaming solutions found on PC. It’s hard for a single device to handle rendering a game while also dealing with recording and transmitting a stream. The result is that streaming on the PS4 and Xbox One is barebones. In the case of PC gaming, the streaming setup typically involves either multiple computers or one quite powerful machine. Thus streamers have access to all kinds of effects, like overlays that put masks on their faces.
According to our tipster, Microsoft will make the camera a huge priority, while the Prospero kit uses older camera technology. (It’s worth noting that what’s in a development kit doesn’t necessarily reflect what ships in a final product.)
Meanwhile, Microsoft’s camera is allegedly capable of 4K resolution with just a two-frame latency between what is recorded and what appears on a stream. (The current Microsoft Kinect camera
gets about 8ms to 10ms of latency.) The tipster claims Microsoft is showing off the capabilities of the camera using a Snapchat-like demo that changes with the in-game lighting.
