Xbox Series X shaping up to be a beast

The Xbox Series X is shaping up to be one mighty console according to official specs released by Microsoft earlier this week. While we already knew that it would feature an AMD’s Zen 2 processor and RDNA graphics, but now we have more information about what’s under the hood.

• 8-Core AMD Ryzen “Zen 2” CPU at 3.6 GHz
• AMD Radeon “Navi” GPU (RDNA 2.0) at 12 TFLOPS
• 16 GB GDDR6 memory, 13 GB guaranteed usable by games
• NVMe SSD
• Video output up to 8K resolution or 120Hz
• 4K Blu-ray drive
• 3 USB ports, HDMI 2.1

While some details are still under wraps, this theoretically makes the Series X at least twice as powerful as the Xbox One X. In fact, it’s probably going to be more powerful than a lot of higher end desktop PCs are at the moment.

AMD’s current Radeon 5700 XT is already outperforming their earlier GCN based Vega 64 in real world benchmarks, despite having 24 fewer compute units, and two fewer TFLOPS. Meaning that RDNA is much more efficient than previous offerings in current pro consoles. My best estimate is the Series X GPU will feature 56 compute units, with performance matching Nvidia’s current RTX 2080 Super. Perhaps even touching the still rather pricey 2080 Ti in some circumstances.

What AMD and Microsoft have still been quiet about is the hardware based ray tracing features in the upcoming GPU. We know the Series X will have it, but we still don’t know exactly what that will entail, how it will perform, or how it will be utilized by developers. So far, ray tracing on PC has been somewhat of an under cooked experience. So it’s difficult to really judge at this point.

Aside from the processors, we also have confirmation that the Series X will utilize an NVMe SSD for storage. The technology uses the PCIe interface to offer a high speed link between the drive and CPU. This should drastically improve load times over the antiquated laptop hard disks utilized by even the current “pro” consoles. With faster access times, it will allow for much larger, more detailed game worlds to be built, along with much quicker load times overall. However, the size of the storage has yet to be confirmed. NVMe drives are much more expensive than traditional mechanical ones, so there is some concern that next gen systems won’t ship with adequate space. Especially given how many game installs are going over 100GB in size.

So far there’s no word on pricing. However, with this sort of hardware, it’s likely going to be at least $500 USD, if not more. Though the high end components should at least mean greater longevity than the current crop of consoles.

The Xbox Series X is due out for Holiday 2020.

Source: Windows Central