Microsoft reveals its final Xbox Project Scorpio specs

Microsoft previously revealed some Project Scorpio specifications, but today the company is unveiling a lot more, thanks to Digital Foundry. Eurogamer's separate vertical, that focuses analysis on the speeds-and-feeds of gaming PCs and consoles, has published a big overview of the graphical power of Microsoft's next Xbox console.

So far, we've known that Project Scorpio will run at 6 teraflops, ahead of its main competitor the PlayStation 4 Pro with 4.2 teraflops of graphical power. Microsoft also plans to replace its 8GB of DDR3 RAM / 32MB of ESRAM with 12GB of GDDR5 memory on Project Scorpio. While many had hoped Microsoft would transition to AMD’s latest Ryzen CPU architecture, Digital Foundry has revealed that the company is sticking with a custom Jaguar-based processor.

It's not a Ryzen CPU

AMD first released Jaguar processors back in 2013, and Microsoft’s original Xbox One and Sony’s PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 4 Pro both use chips based on the Jaguar microarchitecture. Even so, the new x86 cores in Scorpio are 31 percent faster than the Xbox One's, and Microsoft’s reluctance to move to Ryzen might not actually mean much. Digital Foundry reveals that Microsoft's custom GPU engine on Project Scorpio runs at an impressive 1172MHz, that's a big increase over both the Xbox One's 853MHz and the PS4 Pro's 911MHz.

Microsoft is promising to do a lot with this power, and the company believes 900p and 1080p Xbox One games should be able to run at native 4K on Project Scorpio. According to the report, all Xbox One and Xbox 360 games will see a noticeable performance boost. This stands in contrast with the PS4 Pro, which recently received a Boost Mode that added minor improvements to some PS4 games, and requires custom patches for significant upgrades to each game.

YouTube will no longer allow creators to make money until they reach 10,000 views

Five years ago, YouTube opened their partner program to everyone. This was a really big deal: it meant anyone could sign up for the service, start uploading videos, and immediately begin making money. This model helped YouTube grow into the web’s biggest video platform, but it has also led to some problems. People were creating accounts that uploaded content owned by other people, sometimes big record labels or movie studios, sometimes other popular YouTube creators.

In an effort to combat these bad actors, YouTube has announced a change to its partner program today. From now on, creators won’t be able to turn on monetization until they hit 10,000 lifetime views on their channel. YouTube believes that this threshold will give them a chance to gather enough information on a channel to know if it’s legit. And it won’t be so high as to discourage new independent creators from signing up for the service.

“In a few weeks, we’ll also be adding a review process for new creators who apply to be in the YouTube Partner Program. After a creator hits 10k lifetime views on their channel, we’ll review their activity against our policies,” wrote Ariel Bardin, YouTube’s VP of product management, in a blog post published today. “If everything looks good, we’ll bring this channel into YPP and begin serving ads against their content. Together these new thresholds will help ensure revenue only flows to creators who are playing by the rules.”

Of course, along with protecting the creators on its service whose videos are being re-uploaded by scam artists, these new rules may help YouTube keep offensive videos away from the brands that spend money marketing on their platform. This has been a big problem for YouTube in recent weeks. “This new threshold gives us enough information to determine the validity of a channel,” wrote Bardin. “It also allows us to confirm if a channel is following our community guidelines and advertiser policies.”

As it moves ever closer to parity with the world of prime-time television, YouTube is sensibly taking steps to police how business is done on its service. Time will tell how a rising generation of creators respond to these new limitations.

You can install the Windows 10 Creators Update manually right now

If you’re not too keen on waiting for the next Patch Tuesday to get your hands on Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 10 Creators Update, you can manually install the new version of the OS through the company’s website. Microsoft announced last week in a blog post that it would make the update available as a manual upgrade about a week prior to the official release, and it’s made good on the promise by enabling it through the Windows 10 Update Assistant. Go here to download Assistant if you don’t already have it, and follow the instructions to update to version 1703.

The update has been available for more than a week now to members of the Insider Program, but this is the first time it’s available in an official capacity for users who are running a non-beta version of Windows 10. So if you’re no longer interested in continuously receiving automatic updates to new test versions of Windows 10, you can disable that feature in the settings panel and enjoy the Creators Update in all its glory. It’s not a major upgrade, but there is a 3D-focused version of the classic Paint app, a new Game Mode for optimizing PC settings, and some additional gaming features that better bridge the gap between the Windows 10 and Xbox platforms.