Last weekend, Xbox boss Phil Spencer unveiled the technical performance of the future Xbox Series X. The new Microsoft console will be a monster of power.
As gamers around the world wait for news from PlayStation 5, Sony delays the deadline for big revelations. Recently, the Japanese giant declined the invitation to E3 2020 (Electronic Entertainment Expo, in Los Angeles) in June. He also just canceled for PAX East in Boston, from February 27 to March 1, due to Coronavirus.
Its American competitor, Microsoft, did not need more to draw. And on February 24, it was Phil Spencer, the leader of Xbox, who took advantage of the silence of his rival to reveal the technical specifications of his future console, via the official Xbox site .
12 Teraflops, among the most powerful machines
Based on the latest Zen 2 and RDNA 2 architectures from AMD, Microsoft’s black monolith will benefit from a computing power of 12 teraflops. Twice as much as an Xbox One X, and four times more than an Xbox One.
In comparison, the most powerful graphics cards on the market, the GeForce RTX 2080 and the RTX 2080 Ti benefit respectively from a processing power of 10.1 Tflops and 13.4 Tflops. And according to Digital Foundry , the Sony PlayStation 5 would only benefit from a processing power of 9.2 Teraflops .
Microsoft will use its patented VRS ( Variable Rate Shading ) format to provide a more stable framerate (number of frames per second) and better resolution. And here, Phil Spencer speaks of a rate of up to 120 frames per second, for a resolution of up to 8K .
And according to Phil Spencer, the VRS will be associated with Hardware-accelarated DirectX Raytracing in order to give players more dynamic and realistic environments, for immediate immersion.
Much faster
The other highlight of the Xbox Series X will be its speed of execution. “More playing and less waiting” or “more play and less waiting”! Concretely, the console will use SSD support, much faster than a conventional hard drive.
Phil Spencer explains:
“With our new generation of SSD storage, the entire gaming experience is improved. The game worlds are wider and more dynamic, and “ fast travel ” is finally aptly named: it is now done in an instant.”
In other words, when he wanted to move from one place to another in a game, the player often had to undergo a loading time of a few tens of seconds (or more). With this new technology, this same loading time is limited to a few hundredths, even thousandths of seconds. From the player’s point of view, the transition is almost instantaneous.
Backwards compatibility, multi-media, cloud-gaming
Among his many announcements, Phil Spencer also confirmed backward compatibility on Xbox Series X , with the three previous generations. In other words, the Series X will also play Xbox, Xbox 360 and Xbox One games.
With its “Smart Delivery” technology Microsoft promises that, for a year or two, future games will be usable on both Xbox One and Xbox Series X. The player will have only one version to buy.
In agreement with the television manufacturers, the new Xbox will benefit from the latest advances in terms of HDMI 2.1 connection, such as the “Auto Low Latency Mode” (ALLM) and the “Variable Refresh Rate” (VRR) features. This is to reduce the latency with the TV screen.
Thanks to the Dynamic Latency Input (DLI) , the latency of the controller will also be considerably reduced.
If Microsoft continues to release games in physical format, the Xbox Series X will allow the brand to take it to the next level in terms of cloud gaming. And a few weeks ago, the boss of Xbox did not hide wanting to attack the very juicy market of the game in streaming. He then declared:
“We consider that Amazon and Google are our main competitors for the future […] It is not to disrespect Nintendo and Sony, but the traditional video game companies are a bit out of the running […] I don’t want to not fight these guys in a format war, while Amazon and Google focus on “how to make video games for 7 billion people worldwide”! This is the objective in the end.”
The Xbox Series X will arrive against the PS5 at the end of the year. Its price has not yet been announced.
