This is it. After months of teaser trailers, blog posts and even the occasional leak, we can finally reveal firm, hard facts on Xbox Series X. We visited Microsoft’s Redmond WA mothership in the first week of March, we saw the unit, handled it, played on it and even constructed it from its component parts. We’ve seen the NVMe expandable storage, we’ve had our first taste of hardware accelerated ray tracing on next-gen console and we’ve seen how one of Microsoft’s most talented developers is looking to enhance one of the most technically impressive games available today for the new Xbox. We’ve had a taster of some brilliant backwards compatibility features – and yes, today we can reveal the full, official specification for the Xbox Series X console.
There’s a vast amount of material to share but for now, we’ll be trying to deliver the key points with the promise of much more to come. In this piece, we’ll be looking in depth at the tech powering the new machine, and we’ll reveal:
How Series X is more than twice as powerful as Xbox One X in practice;The difference its hardware accelerated ray tracing will make to the look of your games;How its radical approach to memory and fast storage could be a game-changer – including the amazing Quick Resume feature;Microsoft’s war on input lag and screen tearing;And some impressive compatibility features, including automated HDR for older games!
It all starts with the three key tenets that the next generation Xbox is built upon: power, speed and compatibility. Microsoft doubtless has its own messaging to share built around these pillars, but they also serve as a solid foundation for our story too.
With power, it all begins with the Project Scarlett SoC – system on chip. The processor is fabricated on an enhanced rendition of TSMC’s 7nm process, which we understand rolls up a bunch of improvements to the technology, right up to but including the new EUV-based 7nm+. The chip itself is a 360mm2 slice of silicon (significantly smaller than we speculated), that pairs customised versions of AMD’s Zen 2 CPU core with 12.155 teraflops of GPU compute power.