When it comes to this year in the video game industry, most of our attention is focused on two major companies, Microsoft and Sony. Both companies are coming into this year knowing that the holiday season will mean the release of their next-generation console platforms. Today we received some new details about the Xbox Series X thanks to a blog post from the head of Xbox, Phil Spencer.
We are still waiting to hear more about both consoles but today we’re given some new Xbox Series X talking points. While not everything is unveiled yet and we’re unsure what new features will be incorporated, Phil Spencer was able to highlight a few areas about the power of the Xbox Series X. For instance, according to Phil Spencer, the Xbox Series X will be using a custom-designed processor from AMD’s latest Zen 2 and RDNA 2 architectures. This will be able to deliver four times the processing power of the Xbox One with 12 TFLOPS of GPU performance, that’s twice the performance of the Xbox One X.
Likewise, with DirectX Raytracing and the new patented Variable Rate Shading, the Xbox Series X will be able to not only look more dynamic than the Xbox One X but also continue to keep a stable frame rate at a higher resolution. Once again, in the blog post, Phil Spencer highlighted the SSD storage which will allow faster load times, however, this will also allow Quick Resume on multiple games.
Phil Spencer also made note of backward compatibility. With the Xbox Series X, it’s said that Xbox One, Xbox 360 and original Xbox games will look even better with faster load times and improved resolution, all without the need of any extra developer work. As we made mentioned in the past, Xbox Series X will not have any exclusive titles at launch which means that Xbox One players will still be able to gain access to some of the latest Microsoft exclusive titles without the need for jumping onto the latest platform.
This will be done through Smart Delivery, a technology that allows players to purchase the game once where it will be able to recognize if it’s being played on the Xbox One or Xbox Series X. This technology is available to all developers and publishers, though they will have the choice on if it will be implemented on their video game titles going forward.
For now, we got a good look at the power behind the Xbox Series X and you can read the full details from the blog post right here. We should be hearing more about the Xbox Series X as we move towards E3 2020.