In summary The Xbox Series X is a wonderfully powerful console that plays games in 4k with frame rates of 120 enables fps, with graphic effects that were only possible on a PC until now. In addition, the Series X has a very fast NVMe SSD and an accompanying API that shortens loading times enormously and also offers interesting possibilities during gaming. Furthermore, the Series X will receive support for Dolby Vision next year, which is especially interesting because of the dynamic metadata. It is a point that the Series X is ahead of its major competitor PlayStation 5. On the other hand, the controller of the Series X has been improved, but not as spectacular as that of the PS5. Finally, Microsoft wins points with the excellent Xbox ecosystem, mainly because of the benefits that the Game Pass offers.

On 10 November is the time, then the arrival of a new generation of consoles is a fact. Microsoft kicks off this time with the introduction of the fourth edition of the Xbox. The new console even comes in two flavors, the Series X and its smaller brother, the Series S. We will discuss the latter another time, now we focus on Microsoft’s standard bearer: the Xbox Series X which 500 will cost euros. We previously published an extensive preview of the new console and we recommend that you read that article to get acquainted with the new console.

After another three weeks of experience with the Series X, it is now time for a balanced judgment, although we immediately reveal that we still do not have a really complete picture of the possibilities of the new console . Before we share our experiences with the Series X, let’s dive into the hardware first. Because what’s in that black fridge?

The hardware of the Xbox Series X As with previous generations, the heart of the Xbox Series X and Series S comes from Advanced Micro Devices. AMD is currently the only manufacturer capable of producing both x 90 – Processors as high-performance GPUs, again in the form of a system-on-a-chip (soc

What makes the launch of the new generations of consoles extra interesting is that not only the GPU part of the chip shows significant improvements compared to the previous generation, but also the cpu. For gaming, most of the calculations are handled by the GPU. That is where the focus lies when it comes to the question of how graphically complex a game can be made and at what resolution it is rendered. In the Xbox Series X, the GPU also takes up no less than three-quarters of the total surface of the soc. A fast GPU does not come into its own in games without a CPU that also has sufficient speed. After all, the processor must provide the GPU with instructions and handle in-game logic itself.

With the previous two generations, exactly that was a challenge: the processor used was on the slow side compared to the gpu. The chips for the Xbox One and One X also came from AMD and at the time the manufacturer’s processor offering was nowhere near as competitive as it is today. The Jaguar cores in previous generations of consoles were originally designed for laptops, but proved to be incapable of breaking even in that product category. As a result, it almost became the rule that games on 31 fps ran; a higher frame rate was the exception. Although the processor of these generations already had eight cores with two clusters, this was not a complete solution due to the latency-sensitive nature of largely serial instructions. A large number of slow CPU cores is not necessarily a substitute for a smaller number of fast CPU cores in gaming.

Project Scarlett The Zen 2 processor cores used and the RDNA 2 architecture for the GPU together form part of the Series X soc, also known as code-named Project Scarlett. These parts are both competitive, at least at the time of writing this review. The hardware of the new Xbox generation seems a lot more balanced than with the previous generations.

Finding the balance in the design of the chips for the new consoles is anyway of importance for the end product that should not be underestimated. If you keep the specifications of the new Xbox next to those of recent PC hardware, you will notice that video cards with many more compute units are available. A new generation of Zen processors has also recently been released and the clock speeds of the new consoles are lagging behind. However, the choice of hardware requires looking beyond raw specifications and accurately identifying what makes sense, not just what is possible. Viewed from the overall cost of a console, one chip with virtually all components integrated on it must be suitable for hundreds of contemporary and future games, have an acceptable energy consumption and heat production, and be cost-effective to mass-produce. All of this must be financially viable on a more expensive production process than before.

Console Xbox Series X Xbox Series S Xbox One X Xbox One Code Name Project Scarlett Project Lockhart Project Scorpio Durango Die-size soc 360 , 4mm² ? 367 mm² 375 mm² Number of transistors 15, 3 Billion 8 Billion 6.6 Billion 4.8 Billion Processor 8 custom Zen 2 cores with smt 8 custom Zen 2 cores with smt 8 custom Jaguar cores 8 custom Jaguar cores CPU Speed ​​ 3.8GHz (3, 66 GHz w / smt) 3.6GHz (3.4GHz with smt) 2.3GHz 1, 75 GHz Storage 1TB , ‘custom NVMe-PCIe 4.0-ssd’ 512 GB, ‘custom NVMe -PCIe 4.0 SSD ‘ 500 GB / 1TB / 2TB 2.5 inch sata hdd 1TB 2.5 inch sata-hdd GPU 52 compute units 1825 MHz 20 compute units

1565 MHz 40 compute units 1172 MHz 12 compute units 853 MHz GPU Architecture Custom RDNA 2 Custom RDNA 2 Custom GCN 4 (Polaris) Custom GCN GPU computing power 15, 15 Tflops 4 Tflops 6 Tflops 1, 31 Tflops Memory 16 GB GDDR6 10 GB GDDR6 12 GB GDDR5 8GB DDR3 (32 MB esram) Memory Speed 10 GB @ 560 GB / s

6GB @ 336 GB / s 8GB @ 224 Gbit / s

2GB @ 56 GB / s 326 GB / s 68 GB / s (esram 204 GB / s) Connection HDMI 2.1 HDMI 2.1 HDMI 2.0 HDMI 1.4 List price € 500, – € 300, – € 499, – € 499, – Release date 10 November 10 November November 7th 2017 22 November 2013 CPU, GPU and SSD On the CPU side, it is striking that Microsoft is talking about custom Zen 2 cores with a total of 8MB L3 cache, clearly not requiring large amounts of L3 cache are present as on the Ryzen desktop processors. That has everything to do with the fact that the soc of the Series X is not built from chips but from one chip. This one chip is not used as a lower positioned product in the case of less successful or partially defective copies, such as the binning that we almost always see with video cards and processors. Instead, as with the Xbox One X, Microsoft has opted for overspecification: from the 56 gpu compute units are 52 actually used in the final product.

A can on the Series X SoC The Zen 2 processor used is also custom in the sense that the memory controllers of them are linked to the shared GDDR6 memory, along with the GPU. So, as on previous generations, this is a uniform memory type, with a total of 16 GB via a 320 – bit memory bus. The clock speeds are slightly lower when using smt than without. Microsoft expects that developers will initially prefer the higher clock speeds over the extra processor threads. This will have everything to do with the fact that most games will be developed in such a way that they also work on existing generations of consoles (Xbox One and One X), which are hardware limited to 8 threads anyway.

The Project Scarlett GPU was developed on the basis of the RDNA 2 architecture, but we still know relatively little about exactly how various new features have been implemented. There is hardware support for ray tracing, as well as variable rate shading, mesh shaders and sampler feedback. These features are included in AMD’s RX video cards 6000 series and Microsoft has indicated that the feature set of this architecture is fully available to developers, both on the Series X and Series S consoles.

At least as innovative as the more powerful processor and GPU is the storage of the Series X. Under the name Velocity Architecture , Microsoft has linked fast storage in the form of an NVMe SSD to the soc in collaboration with AMD. Although: we now call it ‘storage’, but the SSD partly fulfills the role of working memory in practice. Combined with the DirectStorage API, the hardware can exchange data at lightning speed between the GDDR6 memory and the SSD. As a gamer, this is particularly helpful in practice if you use the quick resume function: within a few seconds the exact state of your (paused) game is saved and that of another game is loaded, after which you can start exactly from the point where you can continue playing.