Xbox One X.
That’s the official name Microsoft’s given to Project Scorpio, the upcoming 4K-ready Xbox One successor, which took centre stage at Microsoft’s E3 2017 press conference on Sunday. It’s arriving on 7 November 2017 in the US for $500 and will, in Microsoft’s words, be “the most powerful console ever”. That was Microsoft’s main message for the show, repeatedly emphasising its advantages over the competing PlayStation 4 Pro without ever mentioning its fellow console by name.
And it sure is a powerful console. The Xbox One X’s raw tech specs include a RAM boost, from 8Gb of DDR3 up to 12Gb of GDDR5, for a memory bandwidth of 326Mb/s – comparable to Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1080. And like the GTX 1080, the Xbox One X features swanky vapor chamber cooling technology.
It’s enough of a beast to run many of Microsoft’s most popular franchises, including the upcoming Forza Motorsport 7, at 4K resolution and 60 frames per second. Don’t expect that from all games, though, as the comparable Radeon RX 580 graphics card would be hard pressed to hit that lofty frame rate in many modern games unless you severely dialed back graphics quality.
If you don’t have a 4K TV, Microsoft still wants to tout the Xbox One X’s advantages – primarily through supersampling, the process by which a game renders at a higher resolution and then downscales to fit your screen, which can have a huge effect on level of detail, clarity, and anti-aliasing. On PC we’ve seen such tech in specific games, such as Shadow of Mordor and The Witcher 2, while AMD and Nvidia have both built the tech into their recent graphics cards (Virtual Super Resolution and Dynamic Super Resolution, respectively).
Games on 1080p TVs will also get anisotropic filtering and faster load times on the Xbox One X. And like the Xbox One S, Microsoft’s new console also supports high-dynamic range visuals.
Specs not enough to win you over? Microsoft also made sure to mention the Xbox One X is also the “smallest Xbox ever” – a welcome change from the behemoth Xbox One released in 2013, with its chunky VCR aesthetic. The Xbox One X doesn’t look much different from the original Xbox One, but it’s a bit sleeker and apparently quite a bit smaller.
To support the Xbox One X’s reveal, Microsoft showed off 42 games coming to the Xbox One ecosystem, including 22 Xbox exclusives.
IDG News Service
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