Amidst a global pandemic, gaming world has flourished like a scene rarely seen before. And to add to it, there is a line-up of new releases which will force a lot of people to stay in their rooms. Microsoft’s newly price tagged Xbox can be one of those releases. Series X seems to be the most promising console created till date. With the shape of a tower PC, it has been designed in order to narrow down the gap between console and PC gaming.
The processor on Series X is an octa-core AMD Zen 2 clocked at 3.8 GHz (3.6 with SMT) and AMD Navi 2x GPU with RDNA 2 architecture, clocked at 1.825 GHz(12 TFLOPS). Microsoft claims that the graphic performance on the newer generation Xbox will be twice as much as that seen on Xbox One X. Safe to say that several games will run the same as “Ultra Graphics” settings on high-end PCs. The console promises 60fps performance on 4K displays for the games which are compatible with capabilities up to 120fps and is ready to take 8K displays at 60fps. While 8K and 4K are still not so common in the gaming world, this just makes the consoles a longer competitor without a need of upgrade. And oh, of course, it supports Ray Tracing.
The memory on the new Xbox is 16GB GDDR6 RAM, with 10GB @ 560GBps for the GPU and 6GB @ 336GBps for rest of the system. This bifurcation of memory targeted at improving performance should be a giant leap for this generation of consoles. The storage on this machine is 1TB NVMe SSD(PCIe 4.0) with an option for a 1TB add-on module designed specifically for the Xbox. The SSD offers a bandwidth of 2.4GBps for uncompressed data. With the new Xbox Velocity Architecture, the system can use the SSD as a virtual RAM allowing the use of Quick Resume feature to switch between games smoothly. Series X also supports external HDD with USB3.2 to increase the storage as much as you want.
The new controller looks essentially the same as the Xbox One controller. Phil Spencer, in an interview to GameSpot said, “We think we have a good controller in the market today, so we didn’t really feel like we needed to go back to square one to build [a new controller].” The Series X controller introduces the Share Button to Xbox gamers. The share button has been seen on PS4 and Switch already in the last generation. This makes sharing images and recorded videos effortless. The controller also has a Hybrid d-pad which seems to be inspired by the Elite controller for Xbox One. One of the most important addition to the new controller is the Dynamic Latency Input(DLI)which reduces the traditional input latency to as low as possible. This makes gaming smoother and immersive. With all the improvements seen on the new controller, it still lacks rechargeable batteries. Yikes.
The audio will be ray traced, giving a more realistic depiction of depth, shape and size of the environment. Series X will support Dolby Digital 5.1, DTS 5.1, PCM (2.0,5.1,7.1) and Dolby TrueHD. The new generation of Microsoft consoles will be the first one to support Dolby Vision gaming. Other than these major features on the console, the VR compatibility is a no for the launch model of Series X. The Series X will also be extensively backwards compatible with Xbox One and the supported 360 and the Xbox games.
Open to pre-orders from September 22, the product releases on November 10 priced at ₹49,990.
