DF: Hands-On With Xbox Series X + Xbox Series X Complete Specs

credit: @Juub1990

Full news article:

Series X

To close out the segment on the power of Xbox Series X, The Coalition’s Technical Director, Mike Rayner, came up to show us how his team is planning to optimize Gears 5 for Xbox Series X. The team showcased a technical demo of Gears 5, powered by Unreal Engine, for Xbox Series X using the full PC Ultra Spec settings, which included higher resolution textures and higher resolution volumetric fog, as well as a 50% higher particle count than the PC Ultra Specs allowed. They also showed off the opening cutscene, which now runs at 60 FPS in 4K (it was 30 FPS on Xbox One X), meaning the transition from real-time cutscenes to gameplay is incredibly smooth.

Full news article:

Series X

To close out the segment on the power of Xbox Series X, The Coalition’s Technical Director, Mike Rayner, came up to show us how his team is planning to optimize Gears 5 for Xbox Series X. The team showcased a technical demo of Gears 5, powered by Unreal Engine, for Xbox Series X using the full PC Ultra Spec settings, which included higher resolution textures and higher resolution volumetric fog, as well as a 50% higher particle count than the PC Ultra Specs allowed. They also showed off the opening cutscene, which now runs at 60 FPS in 4K (it was 30 FPS on Xbox One X), meaning the transition from real-time cutscenes to gameplay is incredibly smooth.

lol, two Gamecubes stacked together.

@Juub1990:

Can I borrow this for the OP?

I wish that fan the best of luck...

@Zero_epyon: Of course.

@getyeryayasout: Pretty much. Beautiful piece of tech but without the games to power it, it’s pretty much useless.

Very impressed by the design, and it looks smaller in real life somehow. Big scoop for DF, and all we need to know now is the price, and whether or not a certain virus will delay the launch.

Your move Sony....anything?

For comparisons sake

- A very much needed CPU bump
- 16GB of RAM was to be expected by any reasonable person.
- 1TB of storage, while meh, was also expected with the move to ssd tech
- MEMORY CARDS ARE BACK!
- I am 100% skeptical of their cooling solution

I'm impressed by the GPU, but everything else is kinda meh. I'm just glad the silly leaks and speculation can finally end.

@goldenelementxl said:

For comparisons sake

- A very much needed CPU bump

- 16GB of RAM was to be expected by any reasonable person.

- 1TB of storage, while meh, was also expected with the move to ssd tech

- MEMORY CARDS ARE BACK!

- I am 100% skeptical of their cooling solution

I'm impressed by the GPU, but everything else is kinda meh. I'm just glad the silly leaks and speculation can finally end.

Yeah the fan doesn't look impressive at all and according to DF, the clock speeds of the CPU/GPU are locked so they won't slow down for thermals. That makes me a bit nervous.

Pretty good, depending on price. Agree with the fan comment, RPM probably be sky high. Bet it is made by Delta.

@Zero_epyon: Aren't all consoles like that though?

We've never had console chips clocked so aggressively. Clocking PC parts that high would require a far better cooling solution and airflow. The internals of the Series X looks very PC like. Well except there's only 1 fan and no airflow.

Allowing the clocks to change based on demand would help immensely. Knowing their locked means power and heat being used when it's maybe not necessary

Did Sony showed a teardown of the PS4 prior to launching? This reminds of it and its like MS is pulling a Sony 2013.

Also I love how modular it is. Makes for easy repair which is an appreciated addition.

at least the heatsink is decent in size

:D

Hmm bit of a mixed bag for me as a console. overall good but some frustration.

The Good:

• in terms of the core spec i am happy with that. thats a good console.
• Ram amount is about right. I was surprised by the 320bit interface and different pools but it makes sense to keep costs down. It's good to see the OS is only using around 2.5GB. i was afraid we would see a big rise from this gen as they try to bolt on more bloat. good to see this is not the case. more ram is always nice but i don't think it will be a point of major frustration for developers.
• CPU: better than i thought which is nice. i was expecting the 8 but with 1 disabled for yield and possibly 2 reserved for the OS (again for pointless bloat). great to see the full compliment of 8 is there with 7 for games and 1 reserved for the OS. a 7 core/14 thread (for games) zen2 based CPU at 3.6-3.8GHz is a very very solid gaming CPU.
• GPU: need to know more about the actual makeup of the GPU but it looks good. i suppose we will really only learn more when AMD want to formally reveal RDNA2. on the PC side it looks like we have at least a 56CU RDNA2 GPU on the way (though this is wild speculation on my part) but the 52 in the XsX looks good. it's interesting that they dont have tensor cores but are instead using the normal shaders to do DLSS workloads. It will be interesting to see how that plays out. good ol rapid pack math could pay off nicely here.
• Storage: great to see an SSD. 2.4GB/s transfer speeds is slower than i thought it would be (i was thinking more 3.5GB/s) but thats not really the most important thing an SSD brings. its the latency and seek times that are the most important and the jump from laptop HDDs to these is going to be brilliant. this was one facet of console design that simply had to be fixed from this gen.
• Some focus on reducing latency. Always welcome. making that BC with the older controllers is also a nice tough. its nice to see attention being given to these kind of things.
• VRR support as standard. VRR in general makes sense but makes even more sense on a console. hopefully more TV manufacturers build in VRR support soon.

The bad:

• Same ol controller. a bit boring. Not even flappy paddles as standard. why are flappy paddles not standard!? boggles the mind it does.
• Custom storage: MS are going to kick us in the nuts for this because they can. custom storage. locked down form factor. an old fashioned memory card. its the vita memory card...again. i was afraid that was going to happen and..well...yeah. it has :(.

But yeah it looks like a solid console overall. nothing hugely exciting. more a linear progression. but it looks like its going to do what it sets out to do well.

What do you mean kinda meh? At $499 or even $599 this is a great piece of hardware.

@getyeryayasout: The Initiative - Secret AAAA game.

The Coalition - New Gears, or Perfect Dark Reboot or something new.

343 industries - Halo Infinite.

Turn 10 Studios - Forza Motorsport 8.

Playground Games - Open World RPG, Next Gen Forza Horizon.

Inxile Entertainment - Next Gen RPG.

Obsidian Entertainment - Multiple secret projects in development.

Ninja Theory - Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, Project Mara and third unannounced project.

Compulsion Games - New unannounced project.

World’s Edge - Age of Empires 4.

Moon Studios - Ori and the Will of the Wisp.

Asobo Studio - Microsoft Flight Simulator.

@osan0: The custom storage is less than desirable but I understand that they want to maintain performance and games can only run on the SSD. I expect PS5 may also sport something similar. Somewhat good news is that old games can still be offloaded to traditional hard-drives when not in use.

MS is doing its rounds on Youtube, who else had access?

I’m glad that they clarified that you can use a traditional external to offload games and then, copy them to the SSD to play them. Other than that, hardware checks out, now all that's left is for MS to show the softwares that will make use of all that power. Here's hoping Halo: Infinite will be that game to show it. As long as its price $500, this will no doubt please console gamers.

@Pedro: Who needs E3 when YouTubers can do the job for you? This is how you pass the message effectively.

Which then means that the one system fan will always be working and working hard. That better be the most durable fan ever built for a console.

That’s not an earthquake folks,that’s hermits and cows shaking in their boots HAH

Bu bu bu the cooling,Bu bu bu the games

New studios= more games and experts at DF didn’t have any concerns about cooling,but keep damage control coming it’s funny to watch HAH

XBSX is a monster

Sounds very impressive and it's good to see they went with Digital Foundry again for their spec reveal.. It looks like they came away impressed..

Personally, I'm looking forward to seeing DF's deep dive into the "Xbox Series X enhanced" version of Gears 5 and anything else they can gleen from current-gen games running on the new hardware.. That's all we can hope for in the short-term anyway until next-gen games are finally showcased..

My only concern remains pricing.. This will be a killer box at $499 and hopefully they can release it for that.. But I guess we'll have to wait and see how they position the rumored Xbox Series S (aka Lockhart) in order to really see their full console pricing strategy.. Beyond that, I bet that expanded storage is going to be EXPENSIVE!!.. But I'm definitely buying one of those cards lol

This strategy reminds me of what they did with the One X. Show of the hardware first then spend the remainder of the time on games.

And you are right with regards to the using Youtubers instead of E3.

@Zero_epyon aren't current consoles already using one fan?

@Antwan3K: Microsoft didn’t “go with Digital Foundry” for the tech reveal. Multiple outlets were onsite the first week of March and got the same access.

I'm liking that quick resume feature. I do hesitate to switch between games because of how long it takes sometimes. I'm guessing it only works for digital copies since you'll have to swap discs for physical copies though.

Good catch and a disclaimer should be made for this feature because of this.

Apparently those siting their great concern about games have inside info that Wuhan virus knocked off all the 3rd party devs so yep, no games other than 1st party games coming to SuperMightyMega XseX confirmed. lol Same SW, different day. :P

@bluestars: PC gamers would have access to all MS games so not sure why they would be shaking and PS gamers can have access via xCloud.

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/03/16/xbox-series-x-tech/

To close out the segment on the power of Xbox Series X, The Coalition’s Technical Director, Mike Rayner, came up to show us how his team is planning to optimize Gears 5 for Xbox Series X. The team showcased a technical demo of Gears 5, powered by Unreal Engine, for Xbox Series X using the full PC Ultra Spec settings, which included higher resolution textures and higher resolution volumetric fog, as well as a 50% higher particle count than the PC Ultra Specs allowed. They also showed off the opening cutscene, which now runs at 60 FPS in 4K (it was 30 FPS on Xbox One X), meaning the transition from real-time cutscenes to gameplay is incredibly smooth

https://newsbeezer.com/italyeng/gears-5-tested-on-pc-here-are-the-benefits-with-the-new-gpu-amd-and-nvidia/

XSX's running Unreal Engine 4 on NAVI 2's results are dangerous for NVIDIA. RDNA 2 could have Ryzen style disruption on the PC GPU 4K market

NVIDIA must release RTX 3080 Ti!

From https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/complete-hardware-specs-sheet-of-xbox-series-x-revealed.264797/page-2#post-4226289

@ronvalencia: How is it dangerous for Nvidia?

Yes but to my knowledge, the current consoles have their thermals in check and the components aren't clocked so aggressively.

Edit: I'm not knocking that it has one fan, I'm just worried that the particular fan, based on appearance, won't be enough to bring in and push out enough air to keep that thing cool, especially when the system clocks are locked.

Unless they're going to shock the world and announce that once you install the game the disc isn't needed any longer. I seriously doubt that though, unless they're going the "you can't sell this game afterward" route again.

Nice. I'm glad MS got the hint last gen!

XSX on schedule launching late this year... Bank!!! :P

---

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/mar/11/positive-signs-for-future-of-coronavirus-in-us/

That is quite a jump in logic. The feature would most likely not work with physical games.

I think its unreasonable to believe that they would design the system with a fan that is not good enough. Such a conclusion is rather illogical.

@goldenelementxl: cool, the more the better.. If it was only Microsoft giving this information, we'd probably be seeing alot more "tinfoil hats" in this thread..

yeah I agree.

We'll see. I'm sure it's fine. Just don't want another RRoD situation.

@Pedro: to be honest i don't buy their reasons for going the custom route. the speed and heat argument. motherboard manufacturers have already shown how to manage that. this just looks like the 360 HDD or the vita memory card again. good ol fashioned vendor lockin.

i suppose we will learn more with teardowns and such at a later date but i would be very surprised if there is anything actually special about that SSD.

i suspect you are right that sony will take the same approach with the PS5 though....an opportunity to make a ton of money on it. i hope we are both wrong and the PS5 uses an off the shelf NVME m.2 SSD.

@Zero_epyon: 1825Mhz with 52 CU yields 12.147 TFLOPS FP32 compute and another ~13 TFLOPS equivalent for RT workloads.

TFLOPS per (Unreal Engine 4) Gear 5 frame rate.

From https://www.tweaktown.com/articles/9199/gears-benchmarked-1080p-1440p-4k/index5.html