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After months of teasing and sneak peeks, Microsoft has finally unveiled the full specifications for its next console, the Xbox Series X. However, the jargon-heavy reveal – Microsoft even published a glossary to help explain it all – may leave you scratching your heads over the pros and cons of the impending behemoth.
Here, we strip the reveal down to the best and worst, looking at the most promising, concerning and confusing aspects of the Series X as they currently stand.
First up, everything about the Xbox Series X screams speed. Despite the leap to 4K visual output as a base standard, the real generational advance is going to be in how fast everything about Microsoft’s new titan operates. Its central CPU, a custom Zen2 designed in close collaboration with chipmaker AMD, boasts eight cores running at 3.8GHz, is partnered with a 12-teraflop GPU, and rounded out with 16GB of lightning-fast GDDR6 memory. The console promises four times the throughput of Xbox One X, up to 4GB per second when compressed, and uses a custom decompression block – very basically, a chunk of silicon that takes workload off the CPU, reducing processing bottleneck and increasing speed.
Even the internal storage drive is fast – it’s a custom designed 1TB Solid State Drive with NVMe, or Non-Volatile Media Express, which will allow players to suspend and instantly resume multiple games, even after a full powering down of the console or after a firmware upgrade. The SSD can also serve as virtual memory, improving performance further.
That all should help the Xbox Series X deliver not only a stunning visual experience – and on top of all this, the Series X retains the One X’s 4K UHD Blu-ray drive, so films as well as games will look phenomenal – but smoother and more responsive gameplay.
This will also massively benefit load times, both in transitioning between areas of games as Series X draws on the assets it needs much quicker than even Xbox One X, but in the time it takes a game to boot up. Microsoft has already showcased this with its open-world zombie apocalypse title State of Decay 2, which starts a whopping 40 seconds faster on Series X. Current gen games - which will remain playable on the new hardware - will also benefit from performance enhancements and visual upgrades, such as colour ranges being boosted from SDR to HDR.
Its performance target is a stable 4K at 60fps, but will support framerates as high as 120fps. It also introduces what Microsoft calls “Dynamic Latency Input”, reducing response time from what a player does on their controller to it taking place on-screen. The goal is to “synchronise input immediately with what is displayed” to make sure “controls are even more precise and responsive”.
If it all holds up in the final build, the Series X could provide games that run faster and better than anything players have encountered before. It’s a canny direction for Microsoft – realistically, screen resolutions can only take you so far, especially with most home users not having the space for upcoming 8K sets, so focusing on increased performance could be a key differentiator.
We’re a little less enthusiastic about changes to the controller for Xbox Series X. Admittedly, this is based purely on first impressions – outside of Microsoft and its production partners, no-one has physically gotten their hands on the new controller yet. However, with it described as “accommodating hands similar to those of an average eight-year-old”, the Series X controller raises some doubts.
On one hand – if you’ll pardon the pun – the evolution of Xbox controllers has been a journey of miniaturisation. The original, monstrous 'Duke' soon gave way to the refined Controller S, then came the sleek Xbox 360 pad, each iteration refining and slimming the overall design until arriving at the near perfection of the Xbox One controller. The Series X pad could simply be the next step of that progress, making it more usable still – in a blog post, Ryan Whitaker, senior designer at Xbox, even says the smaller form factor improves “accessibility and comfort for hundreds of millions more people without negatively affecting the experience for those with larger hands”.
On the other hand, our concern is Microsoft may have gone too small here. A pad tailored for eight-year-old hands may be uncomfortable for teens and adults to use. The redesign of the d-pad is also questionable – while clearly inspired by the one on the modular, pro-tier Elite Controller – it evokes more the horrible blob of a d-pad on the aforementioned Duke. It appears to sit on a disc, with the up-down-left-right inputs raised but not distinct.
Other aspects are more promising – an integrated share button, textured grip as standard, batteries finally being internal and rechargable, and most importantly improved latency for more accurate and responsive input are all tantalising concepts.
Fingers crossed, the Series X Controller will ultimately handle better than it looks. If not, the Series X will at least retain compatibility with the Xbox One controller – good news if you have hands bigger than an eight-year old.
One aspect of the Series X that initially seemed a little confusing was its approach to system storage. At a glance, the Xbox Series X appears to offer oodles of storage space. A 1TB solid-state drive lives inside the console, and the Series X continues to offer USB 3.2 HDD support, allowing you to connect an external drive to house even more games.
However, when current generation games can exceed 100GB for install size – Red Dead Redemption 2 is around 110GB on Xbox One – that’s all going to fill up pretty quickly when it comes to games that are 4K as standard. To combat this, Microsoft seems to be taking an old-school approach, introducing memory card-style expansion drives.
Officially, Microsoft is referring to the memory cards as storage expansion cards. Designed in conjunction with Seagate, they will offer 1TB of removable SSD storage, and connect to a port at the rear of the Series X. They are said to “match internal storage exactly” in terms of performance, meaning they should be capable of the same tricks when it comes to virtual memory, zippy loading speeds, and instant resumption of games that NVMe allows.
Microsoft spokesperson rather dryly states that “the Seagate storage expansion card for Xbox Series X replicates the full speed and performance of the Xbox Velocity Architecture for optimised game processing and can be used for additional storage”. Microsoft also confirms that “players are able to switch between storage expansion cards“, so once one is full, you’ll be able to swap it out for another.
However, with the Series X supporting ‘regular’ external drives too, buyers are likely to be confused over which option is better. If only the expansion cards match the internal storage performance, a bulk storage external drive may not prove capable of running games directly; conversely, a stack of expansion cards isn’t ideal either.
The fact that the expansion cards are proprietary – as in, a unique form factor rather than an industry standard – also risks repeating rival Sony’s biggest mistake with the PSP and PS Vita. There, the restriction to bespoke storage media for the handhelds drove up prices and drove away players. If the proprietary cards are priced much beyond the average market value for a 1TB SSD drive – at time of writing, an external Seagate 1TB SSD retails for approximately £140 – then the Xbox Series X could face similar struggles to Sony’s brilliant-but-doomed handhelds.
Verdict
There’s no doubt the Xbox Series X is going to be an absolute beast of a machine when it arrives, and promises a wholesale reinvention of how games perform.
The spec reveal as it stands may be overwhelming for some, but if the final user experience is as smooth, fast and impressive as it aims to be – and, crucially, if Microsoft can still get the hardware to market this year despite the impact of COVID-19 on manufacturing – it could be an easy leader in the race to be king of the next generation.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
