Following last night's The Game Awards reveal of Microsoft's next-gen console, the Xbox Series X, Gamespot has run a series of exclusive first looks at the console, sharing a lot of new information about what to expect from the new Xbox when it arrives for the holiday 2020 season, including many of the console's specs.
Firstly, the console is designed to "disappear" into your living room so the device promises to be as quiet or quieter than the Xbox One X, with a single large fan operating to ventilate the machine upward and outward its black pillar design.
Speaking of the console's name, Gamespot's Peter Brown assumes (likely correctly) that the addition of "Series" implies other versions of this console are coming later. Going forward, we may have more mid-gen refreshes or even more regularly recurring upgrades a la the iPhone.
The controller looks virtually the same as before, with the most apparent different being a new dedicated share button, which should go over better than the current controller's reliance on the double-tapping home button and then a third face button press for either screenshots or videos. As promised, the console will be backward compatible not just with all games that already run on Xbox One (including its own backward compatible library), but it'll also allow for Xbox One controllers to work with it. Anyone who just bought the Elite Series 2 controller needn't worry about impending obsolescence.
The new controller will also work with PC and Xbox One, for players who stick to those platforms but want some of the new functionality. And if you're wondering whether the monolithic form factor can be laid horizontally to better accommodate your entertainment center, yes it can.
Brown reports that Phil Spencer and his team intend on making the Xbox Series X the most powerful console on the market, though he didn't exactly promise that -- seemingly because the PS5 specs remain a mystery. Series X will offer a NVMe solid state drive in addition to GDDR6 memory as RAM in a move that Spencer hopes will virtually eliminate all load times. This will also allow players to pause and resume multiple games from the background, building on a feature that first came to current-gen platforms where players could suspend a single game.
Others specs include 12 teraFLOPS, which puts the Series X eight times more powerful than the base model Xbox One, and twice as powerful as the Xbox One X. The console will allow for ray tracing, thought ti be the next generation's hotness, and it will allow for 4K at launch but has the capability of reaching 8K and a 120 Hz refresh rate for later down the line. Games aren't expected to use that sort of power at launch as most consumers don't have home theaters even compatible for such visuals yet.
The Xbox team also proudly revealed that the new Hellblade 2 trailer was made in-engine. Brown also learned that Ninja Theory was already in the planning stages of a Hellblade 2 when Microsoft acquired them, alongside their other game in production, next year's Hero Slasher, Bleeding Edge.
No pricing information has yet been shared, and we'd expect a deeper dive next spring and then again at E3 in June all before the Xbox Series X hits stores alongside the PlayStation 5 roughly one year from now.
Thanks to Gamespot for their excellent reporting.
