Xbox One X, Microsoft’s upcoming 4K HDR capable console, has no qualms breaking with tradition.
When it’s released in November, the Xbox One X is set to not only be Microsoft’s most powerful console ever, but the most powerful console on the entire market. It represents a big step forward in terms of the amount of graphical horsepower it’s packing and in the amount of detail in the images it can render.
Despite its power, however, the Xbox One X remains an Xbox One. When it launches it will not only be able to play all the Xbox One’s existing games, but will also receive no exclusive games of its own.
That’s right – every game released for the Xbox One X will run on the existing Xbox One just fine. Not only that, but all the same accessories – controllers, chatpads, headsets and the like – will all work across each system.
So, if Microsoft has created one big happy console family, what’s the purpose of upgrading to Xbox One X?
Well, Xbox One X will be the company’s first native 4K video game console and will have the ability not only to render games at a 3,840 x 2,160 resolution, but often run those games at 60 frames per second. That’s unlike the Xbox One S which can only render games at 1080p and then upscale them to 4K.
Xbox One X will also have a neat trick called Super Sampling, a way to make 1080p images look even better for those who aren’t ready to go full 4K yet. What Super Sampling does is scale down the 4K resolution for a 1080p screen, giving you some of the benefits of the better hardware – think texture improvements, faster framerates and improved image quality – but on your old 1080p TV. Super Sampling something the Xbox One X’s predecessor, the Xbox One S, was capable of, but it’s going to be taken to a whole new level on the Xbox One X.
The two other features that the Xbox One X will borrow from the Xbox One S are the ability to play games in HDR and a built-in 4K Ultra-HD Blu-ray player – something that its main rival, the PS4 Pro, doesn’t offer.
If you’ve heard about Xbox One X in the past, you might’ve heard it called Project Scorpio. Project Scorpio was the codename Microsoft gave to the press at the 2016 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) to whet our appetites for the new console. To make matters slightly confusing, however, Microsoft has announced an Xbox One X Project Scorpio edition – but that’s just a limited-edition console and not its own separate entity.
Read on for all the information Microsoft has given about its new console, including its specs, games, and the latest information Microsoft has given on its console’s long-rumored (yet still unseen) VR support.
Pre-orders for the Xbox One X are back in stock right now. When pre-orders opened in September, they sold out in a matter of days, so if you want to be one of the first to get your hands on this top-of-the-range console when it comes out on November 7, don’t hang about.
For the latest details on Xbox One X pre-orders, be sure to keep an eye on our Xbox One X pre-orders page. As of the time of writing, there isn’t any difference in pricing between retailers, but if that changes we’ll have information on that page so be sure to check it before committing to an order.
When you hear the words “most powerful console on the planet”, you might think of a towering monstrosity the size of a PC case. In actuality, however, nothing could be further from the truth.
The Xbox One X is almost identical to the Xbox One S in appearance – a slim, sleek rectangular console the size of a cable box or a big Blu-ray player. Instead of the all-white exterior of the Xbox One S, however, the base model Xbox One X has a classy space grey finish.
The space grey might not be the first choice for most gamers – many of whom have grown up with the all-black facades of the original Xbox, PlayStation 2 or SEGA Genesis consoles – but the space grey should feel both subtle and fresh when it lands in living rooms. (If you’re absolutely against the space grey, however, check out the aforementioned Project Scorpio edition of the console, which will be available in traditional black).
Of course, there’s more to a system than its color. Like Xbox One S, the One X looks to have two physical buttons: one in place of the touch-capacitive power button and one for the eject button on the face of the console. Beneath them, you’ll find an IR receiver on the left-hand side of the system and a USB port and controller syncing button on the right-hand side.
But the big difference – if you can even it call it big – is the shift of the drive from the front top section down to the very middle of the console. It might not make any difference when it comes to how the console actually works, but it does feel a bit more confusing for players handling the system for the first time.
To get all this power into a console this size, something needed to be cut. In this case it was the lesser-used dedicated Microsoft Kinect port. You can still use the face-reading, microphone-equipped camera should you like (Microsoft is firm about supporting the accessory long into the future) but to do so you will need an additional USB adaptor.
So what exactly makes the system so dang powerful? Try 12GB of DDR5 memory, a custom octo-core CPU overclocked to 2.3GHz and a custom overclocked GPU with 40 CUs and a computational output of 6 Tflops. Those specs help align the Xbox One X with modern gaming computers and should help consoles keep pace with the ever-advancing PC hardware space. The amazing part? All of this power will come inside a shell that’s actually a bit smaller than the current Xbox One S.
Let’s take a closer look at the hardware itself, starting first with the GPU as that’s the main component enabling the Xbox One X’s crazy boost in power. Microsoft hasn’t given us the specific model sitting inside the Xbox One X, but we can safely assume it’s a custom component made for the system. Inside it, you’ll find 40 customized compute units clocked at 1172MHz. That works in conjunction with the upgraded 12GB of GDDR5 RAM and puts the card, on paper, close to the Nvidia Titan XP.
But before you jump on the PC Gamer forums to tell them how consoles have finally surpassed PCs in terms of value performance, just know that unlike a video card’s dedicated VRAM, the Xbox One X’s 12GB of RAM is split in between the system and the GPU, i.e. it’s not comparing apples to apples. The closest comparison for the Xbox One X’s GPU to a card you’d find in a PC is a AMD RX 580 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 – but keep in mind that the Xbox One X has a tighter integration between system design and hardware that allow it to run at slightly higher speeds than either of those two cards.
On the CPU side of things, the Xbox One X is running a custom chip with eight Jaguar CPU cores clocked at 2.3GHz. That’s a 76% increase compared the CPU inside the original Xbox One and Xbox One S, but probably only puts it in the ballpark of a current-gen Intel Core i3 processor. What that means is that you’ll probably see games that look as good on Xbox One X as they do on a low-to-mid-range gaming PC, but we’re still a ways away from Xbox outclassing custom-built gaming rigs.
The more important comparison for the Xbox One X, and the one Microsoft would rather you focus on, is to the PS4 Pro. Sony’s system is a fairly competent competitor – its GPU has 36 compute units at 911Mhz that work in tandem with a 2.1GHz CPU and 8GB of GDDR5 memory. That memory runs into a bit of a bottleneck at the buffer, which is limited to 218GB/s, but it still puts out around 4 Teraflops of performance.
What about Xbox One X vs Xbox One S vs Xbox One? The Xbox One X is definitely the most powerful of the bunch, and will trounce the original in nearly every way. The harder battle the One X will face is against its immediate predecessor, the Xbox One S. The One S is a system that offers upscaled 4K instead of native 4K, HDR and a 4K Blu-ray player. The two systems’ feature sets are similar, even if the hardware inside is radically different.
What’s your takeaway? The Xbox One X is a more powerful console than the PS4 Pro or the original Xbox One, and it’s by a relatively substantial margin, too.
