NNS Reveals Their Thoughts On The Xbox Series X

Project Scarlett has a name and it’s honestly dumber than anything else that could have been chosen. Who decides these things? I was already thinking about this when they went with XBox One X and XBox One S — which are very similar phonetically and caused much confusion in conversations. Now they added another level of crazy with the XBox Series X! Phil Spencer probably named his kids something like Cary and Gary because he eats our confusion for breakfast.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system. Mostly. Let’s take a closer look at what we have in store in Q4 next year.

The XBox Series X is the fourth generation of the XBox line of consoles, and will be backwards compatible will all existing XBox One accessories and games. It’s got a super sleek design with the concept around minimalism. It’s made to stream content, and it shows. There’s a disc slot, but you’ll not likely be using it for the games native to this console. Even though they will have physical media as an option, it feels like they’re transitioning to a primarily digital concept, and because you’ll hopefully be downloading from the store and streaming, they had to up their game as far as specs go.

The Series X is four times as powerful as the XBox One X, and features an AMD Zen 2 architecture and the RDNA architecture. AMD has been killing it with processing over the last few years, and these processors, which released in July 2019, are no joke. The reduced size allows for heavily improved power efficiency. This means the energy that the previous processors used to maintain power can be redirected to other things, like overclocking speed. The smaller size doesn’t mean that you lose cores on the CPU, though! The cores have also shrunk and become more efficient. These processors allows for better performance in just about every way, which is a great sign for what we’re hoping to see from the actual real-world experience we’ll be getting from the new console.

Because the CPU and GPU are so much more powerful, Microsoft was able to do something truly incredible: real-time ray tracing. All those gorgeous graphics in games like Cyberpunk 2077 will be made that much more impressive and at a fraction of the speed. If you haven’t seen how realistic this can be, go check out some of the many, many YouTube videos that showcase this. What you’ll notice is that the reflections and refractions of light come directly from light sources in games, making it difficult to determine what was rendered and what is real. It adds a whole new level of immersion when you can see an explosion happen around the corner from you by looking at the reflection on the paint of a car. If the ground is wet, you can see the moon’s reflection in the puddles in as much detail as you would see in a photo you took on your phone. Combine this with the 120 fps rendering, and the 8k resolution, and you have a beast that cannot be beaten. Well. As long as you have an 8k screen with an appropriate HDMI cable and, if you’re streaming, the networking speed to keep up.

The physical design concept seems pretty interesting. Remember the Kinect? It’s like that but a little bigger. 6″x6″x12″ instead of 2.6″x2.6″x9.8″. So like a long, sleek rectangle. It’s meant to stand straight up, but laying it on the side won’t do any damage. I live in earthquake country, so a 6×6 square won’t keep this thing upright should something E-Day occur. While the price still hasn’t been announced, if it’s anything like previous iterations, I we can expect the Series X to hit somewhere around $500, and I’m not about to let a bunch of dirty Locusts ruin my ability to kill their virtual counterparts in Gears of War.

Overall, I’m thoroughly impressed by this concept. Despite the name being empirically stupid, the XBox Series X has a lot to offer. I’m excited for next year, and I can hardly wait to include it in my collection!

What are your thoughts? What games do you want to see on the XBox Series X? What would you have named it instead? Comment below!

Facebook Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.