The following Xbox will quadruple XB1’s CPU, octuple its GPU efficiency

• Xbox Series X, expected to be in late 2020. It's big. And it has a modified controller compared to the Xbox One pad.

• Straight perspective.

• Phil Spencer confirms that "15 Xbox game studios" are working on new games for the console.

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• This is a better look at the new controller, along with a look at at least one USB Type-A port on the front of the box.

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• Xbox Series X. It floats in a watery landscape.

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• Obvious ventilation points on top of the console tower.

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• Dramatic angle view.

• Official logo.

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• A sizzling role with potentially "real-time" rendering includes a dramatic zoom in on Halo's Master Chief. Halo Infinite is slated to launch near the Xbox 2020 X Holiday 2020 launch window.

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• Let's rumble a sports car through a detailed valley. Probably taken from the Forza franchise.

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• Another dramatic halo landscape view.

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• Phil Spencer then showed the new game Hellblade II: Senua's Saga, which in his opinion "was all captured in the engine to take full advantage of the Xbox X series".

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• The apparent real-time rendering of Senua's detailed face was breathtaking.

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• Lots of scary, creepy things in the Hellblade II trailer. So on brand.

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Back in December, Microsoft showed us what the outside of the Xbox One Series X would look like. Today the company announces in more detail what is on the inside of the box. A blog post explains the machine's internal specifications and new features that focus primarily on speed and compatibility.

forward Compatible

Microsoft reiterated today that "existing Xbox One games, including backward-compatible Xbox 360 and original Xbox games" on the X series continue to be "playable" with more stable frame rates, faster loading times, and improved resolution and visual fidelity – all without developer work "What's even more exciting, however, is that Microsoft appears to have announced a new forwarding compatibility commitment across the Xbox line through a program called Smart Delivery.

In Microsoft's words, Smart Delivery "allows you to buy a game once and know that whether you play it on Xbox One or Xbox Series X, you have the right version on every Xbox you play of this game. " That sounds a lot like the existing system, which automatically downloads higher-resolution packages for "Xbox One X Enhanced" versions of older Xbox One games. By extending the same system to the X series, publishers can take advantage of features like ray tracing and SSD load times without having to develop and sell an entirely new, exclusive X series version of the game.

Microsoft has hinted last month that all Series X versions of Microsoft will be playable on the original Xbox One in the first year or two. Today's announcement confirms this commitment and highlights that all Xbox Game Studios titles use Smart Delivery to "(ensure) that you only need to purchase one title to play the best available version for the Xbox console you want to play. "" However, we have to ask ourselves when some games will no longer have the "best available version" for the original Xbox One hardware.

It sounds more than ever as if games in the Xbox universe now function like PC games, with a single title being rendered with different fidelity depending on the underlying hardware. Publishers can also upgrade games that were previously explicitly designed for Xbox One to take full advantage of the X series. CD Projekt Red has already announced that there will be a free "Series X upgrade" for Cyberpunk 2077 sometime. The first confirmation that the game is targeting next-generation hardware.

Chips and flops

We have known since last June that Microsoft is planning to use a Zen 2 architecture CPU in the upcoming X series (at that time only known as Project Scarlett). Today, the company announced that the CPU will have "four times the computing power of an Xbox One" and that the 12-teraflop GPU will be twice as fast as the Xbox One X and eight times as fast as the original Xbox One.

According to Microsoft, the X Series GPU will be based on AMD's RDNA 2 architecture. Little is known about this ray-tracing update of last year's RDNA graphics cards, but AMD plans to release more about the 7nm FinFET processors in just a few weeks.

Enlarge /. A Microsoft slide that highlights some of the key X Series features in today's announcement.

The current scuttlebutt is that the new design could offer a performance increase of up to 50 percent over older RDNA chips, which largely corresponds to the statistics cited by Microsoft. These numbers also largely confirm the leaked specifications discussed by Digital Foundry at the end of December. Microsoft also promotes "variable rate shading," which "prioritizes individual effects on specific characters or key environmental objects" to maintain frame rate in complex scenes "without sacrificing final image quality."

Microsoft also went into more detail on the benefits of the previously announced GDDR6 X Series RAM and new generation SSD, which are reported to act as "virtual RAM". This hardware is at the service of a new multi-game resume feature that allows you to resume multiple games almost instantly from a paused state to return to your location and activities without having to wait for long screens. "The current Xbox One has a similar function, but can only save a status for the quick resumption of the last game played.

The last major update in today's announcement is the use of "Dynamic Latency Input", a system that uses a "proprietary, high bandwidth wireless communication protocol" to "instantly synchronize inputs with what is displayed, controls are even more precise." and more responsive ". We look forward to hearing more details about what this actually means, including the number of milliseconds of input delay implied by the supposedly "immediate" synchronization.