Microsoft on Wednesday announced that its next-generation Xbox Series X will launch globally including in India on November 10 alongside the Xbox Series S, a smaller console designed from ground up to bring similar experiences at an even more affordable price. The Xbox Series X will be available at an estimated retail price of Rs 49,990. The Xbox Series S will meanwhile cost Rs 34,990.
Microsoft said it was also expanding its Xbox All Access program to 12 countries this holiday, with more to come in 2021. The program will allow potential buyers to purchase an Xbox Series X or Xbox Series S starting from $34.99 and $24.99 a month for 24 months in addition to free access to 24 months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, Microsoft’s Netflix-style game subscription service.
“Developing two consoles in parallel from the beginning enables us to deliver the most powerful console ever in Xbox Series X and make next-gen gaming available and affordable to more players on day one with Xbox Series S,” Microsoft said in a blog post adding that “access to the next generation should be available to everyone” which is why it was launching two consoles at the same time.
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Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S specs, features
The Xbox Series X packs a custom AMD Zen 2 CPU. Based on a 7nm manufacturing process, the AMD Zen 2 CPU inside the Xbox Series X has 8 cores clocked at 3.8GHz each. It uses a custom AMD RDNA 2 GPU boasting of 12 teraflops and 52 compute units clocked at 1.825GHz each. There is a 1TB NVME SSD inside the Xbox Series X with support for custom expansion cards.
Its biggest feature will be backward compatibility. It will be able to play all the existing backward compatible Xbox and Xbox 360 games, and Xbox One titles, and it will be able to play them natively “with the full power of the CPU, GPU and the SSD.” Not only will these games run at peak performance, in some cases, they will be able to perform even better according to Microsoft.
We are looking at “higher and more steady framerates and rendering at their maximum resolution and visual quality and reduced in-game load times.” Backward compatible games will also benefit from Microsoft’s new Quick Resume feature which will allow gamers to switch between multiple titles quickly.
Microsoft has also added platform-level capabilities to the Xbox Series X that will allow some older games to run in HDR and at up to 120fps.
As for the Xbox Series S, we know that it is 60% smaller than the Xbox Series X. It will be all digital and ship with 512GB of SSD. The Xbox Series S will support up to 120fps gameplay at 1440p resolution and it will be able to upscale games to 4K – while natively supporting 4K streaming media playback. The console will also support variable rate shading and variable refresh rate, as well as Direct X ray tracing.
Now that Microsoft has revealed its cards, we can expect Sony to reveal more about PlayStation 5 price and availability anytime now.
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