Microsoft on Monday revealed new details about the hardware that powers its next console. The Xbox Series X is ostensibly the “most powerful Xbox ever,” intended to deliver high levels of performance that retain this generation’s visual fidelity while also enhancing gameplay. Microsoft also made sure to emphasize that it still intends to deliver the new Series X during this year’s holiday season, despite theorized concerns that China’s COVID-19 lockdown would affect its production.
The general idea behind the Series X, glancing at its specs, is that it’s being built to be surprisingly future-proof. When you look at Digital Foundry’s side-by-side analysis of the Series X’s specs vs. the Xbox One X’s, it’s a stark leap, primarily because the Series X draws on a lot of hardware options that have barely cracked into the desktop PC market. The Series X’s CPU is capable of hyperthreading, which hasn’t really made any inroads into the gaming market yet.
The Series X can also produce some great visuals, but even Microsoft’s post admits that’s a bit of a sideshow at this point. There’s been a lot of analysis over the last few years, about just how much better graphics can actually get. Current systems are already capable of virtually photorealistic models and environments, moving at an unbroken 60 frames per second in 4K resolution.
It’s hard to imagine where a new console could usefully go from here. The answer from Microsoft is to move development toward improvements to the user experience. “We don’t believe this generation will be defined by graphics or resolution alone,” wrote Jason Ronald, the new Xbox’s Director of Product Management.
For example, Microsoft’s previous announcements have made a big deal out of the Series X’s solid-state drive, intended to cut down on if not entirely eliminate loading times in-game, but today’s blog post indicates it’s a one-terabyte NVME SSD.
NVME (Non-Volatile Memory Express) SSDs are made to plug directly into a motherboard, rather than being connected via cables, and can offer read/write speeds that are almost seven times faster, at 3,500MB per second, than the currently-standard SATA drive.
As Jeff Grubb points out in Venturebeat, current consoles’ drives go at 100MB a second at best, and even desktop PCs haven’t quite gotten up to a point where an NVME drive makes a realistic difference in-game. The presence of the new drive in the Series X indicates that a game that can take advantage of it will be able to load and move data faster than any Xbox before it.
That ostensibly means less time looking at loading screens, fewer potential problems with input lag, and more time in-game actually doing things, which has been a particular issue with many higher-end titles this generation. It’s a relatively technical point that mostly has to do with an invisible quality-of-life bonus, but it’s one of the more interesting aspects of what Microsoft’s been focusing on.
The downside of the NVME drive has to do with storage. While 1TB sounds like a lot, any game that can run in 4K resolution is also a notorious hard drive hog; Halo 5, for example, takes up 100GB. Sooner or later, a devoted Xbox fan either has to start making hard choices about what to delete, or will start looking into storage upgrades.
The answer to that from Microsoft, for the Series X, is to add an expansion slot on the back of the unit. According to Digital Foundry’s piece, this will take a custom 1TB Seagate-branded expansion drive. You can still hold your games from older systems on an external USB drive, but Series X-specific titles will have to be on an NVME drive to work.
All this isn’t to say that the Series X has no graphical improvements at all. The Series X offers a significant boost in computing power over the Xbox One X’s specs, and the addition of support for ray tracing means that the system can do more with realistically simulating the movement of light and shadow than, as Microsoft claims, “any technology before it.”
The Series X will also potentially offer the option of games running at up to 120 frames per second, in order to make certain titles such as high-end multiplayer shooters run even faster.
The big question here, though, is still the price tag. Microsoft has been quiet about just how much the Series X is going to cost, and that’s usually the primary driver of success in a given console generation. Sony arguably lost the PS3 vs. 360 console war the moment it announced the base PS3 would launch at $599, and that was in 2006. Now, with a thriving mobile marketplace and near-constant flash sales for digital games, it’s hard to imagine the Series X succeeding at a similar price point. It’s also hard to imagine Microsoft deliberately selling such a future-proofed machine at a massive loss per unit, but that may be what it’d take.
It is interesting to see how much emphasis that Microsoft is placing on what amounts to the user experience, though. Graphics may not have exactly plateaued, but there’s a point at which they don’t need to be any better before diminishing returns – development time, hardware requirements, simple loss of impact – start to kick in.
The Series X could mark the start of an interesting sideways evolution, where we can just take it as read that most games will look amazing and start to explore in other directions, both creatively and technologically. That’s where most of my hype for the Series X is coming from, as long as I don’t have to sell an organ to get one.
