Microsoft has already confirmed that its next high-end Xbox console, aka Xbox Series X, will look a lot like a tower PC, and it will “deliver four times the processing power of Xbox One X in the most quiet and efficient way.” Today, it has revealed ‘literally’ everything about the upcoming console, expected to hit the shelves in December – possibly around the same time Sony drops the PlayStation 5.
Microsoft had already revealed that the Xbox Series X will be powered by a custom AMD Zen 2 processor paired with a Radeon RDNA 2 GPU, GDDR6 RAM and solid-state drive (SSD) storage – the combination, it had said, should entail in a 40x performance jump in storage speed over existing consoles, including Microsoft’s own Xbox One X, currently the most powerful game console in the world.
For spec nerds, here’s what we’re looking at:
— 8 core AMD Zen 2 CPU clocked at 3.8GHz each
— AMD RNDA 2 GPU with 12 teraflops and 52 compute units clocked at 1.825GHz each
— 16GB GDDR6 RAM (2.5GB reserved by the OS)
— 1TB NVME SSD storage expandable by up to another 1TB via custom expansion cards
— USB 3.2 external HDD support
— 4K Blu-ray drive
— 130mm fan for cooling
Microsoft is particularly touting faster load times, in addition to pushing performance at 4K 60fps, up to 120fps, and 8K gaming. The console will feature something that Microsoft is calling ‘Xbox Velocity Architecture,’ that would seemingly allow 100 GB of game assets to be ‘instantly’ accessible by the developer who could then enhance their large open world games with high fidelity environments using the power and SSD of the Xbox Series X. The console will also feature Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM) and Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) for smoother gameplay along with Ray-tracing.
“Thousands of games across four console generations will look and play best” on the Xbox Series X, Microsoft has already confirmed, hinting that the console will theoretically be compatible with existing backward compatible Xbox and Xbox 360 games, and Xbox One titles.
The same will be true about the controllers as well. Even though Microsoft will be shipping a new USB-C controller with Bluetooth Low Energy and quick share button, all your existing controllers will work just fine with the Xbox Series X.
