Microsoft will hand early Scorpio look to its biggest Xbox One critics

The game-hardware analysts at Eurogamer subsidiary Digital Foundry appear to have gotten their hands on another major piece of upcoming gaming kit. This time, they're set to announce "exclusive" info about Microsoft's upcoming "Project Scorpio" revision to the Xbox One, but in a curious move, the outlet has pinned an exact date and time: Thursday, April 6, at 9am ET.

As much as "upcoming news: news is coming" reports can be a little mealy-mouthed, this one is interesting because Digital Foundry's past few years of reporting have not been in Microsoft's favor. A locked-down date and time suggests that the Xbox team is handing Digital Foundry a timed exclusive, which is akin to McDonald's asking the ABC News crew behind the notorious "pink slime" report series to spend a few weeks at a beef-processing plant.

Digital Foundry has gone a long way toward confirming exactly how inferior the Xbox One has been to the stock PlayStation 4 in terms of sheer game performance. The systems' clock speeds, RAM bandwidths, and other variables have been reported on for some time, but Digital Foundry's system-comparison tests make clear exactly how Xbox One games have generally suffered as a result. These two-systems-at-once tests typically include elaborate staging, complete with cloned controller inputs on two systems and analysis of visual elements such as anti-aliasing and frame-pacing.

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