With this E3, Microsoft has officially unveiled their next generation Xbox, codenamed Project Scarlett. The announcement doesn't come as a surprise to anyone, as Sony has already dropped some information on their next generation of consoles, and the two are always neck-and-neck when it comes to these things. While the Next Box is still a year and a half away, while we don't yet have the real name of the system, there's plenty of things that can already be talked about and honestly a lot to be excited about.
The Green Machine goes Red again.
As we already knew, both Scarlett and the upcoming PlayStation 5 are going to be powered by custom solutions of AMD's Zen 2 CPU architecture and their Navi GPUs. Microsoft makes similar claims as Sony about this new hardware, stating that it offers quadruple the performance capabilities as the Xbox One X. While we don't know exactly in what regard this number means, we do know that the console will be able to push out up to an 8k resolution and 120 frames per second. Also like the next PlayStation, the system uses a solid state drive and some neat RAM trickery to virtually eliminate loading times. Since full backwards-comaptability is also touted, the dreaded elevators of Mass Effect look to finally be a relic of the past. This seems to encompass Microsoft's vision of the Scarlett being game-focused, as opposed to the all-in-one solution the Xbox One tried to be. One point of interest is that both future machines are claiming to support native real-time ray tracing on the AMD Navi GPUs, something that was notably absent from the PC Navi cards revealed by AMD's E3 conference on Monday.
Subscriptions: the best thing since VR!
Microsoft dedicated a large amount of energy about their Xbox Game Pass service and how beneficial it will be on Scarlett. E3 had no shortage of companies bragging about or introducing their own subscription service, almost ad nauseum, however Microsoft looks to challenge Stadia in the cloud gaming front as well. Using their Azure service as a backbone of sorts, players can turn their Scarlett machines into their own nodes for streaming games, however solid details of how this will work is still yet to be determined. As far as concrete game libraries go, all we know so far is that Scarlett will launch alongside Halo: Infinite, showing the company's dedication to having a strong title available at launch (This far away, even) as well as their commitment to refusing to count properly.
Jump in
Even though we have a year and a half to go, I'm honestly already pretty excited for this next wave of systems. As per usual, both Microsoft and Sony are using very similarly specced machines powered by AMD hardware releasing at the same time. The difference this time is the leap in technology and hardware power. With both major console giants supporting native ray tracing, we will finally start to see the technology be used by game developers just a short... uhh... two years after Nvidia made it the selling point of their $1,000+ RTX desktop GPUs, and with famously few games actually using it. It also looks like console users are finally escaping the 30 FPS mark and horrific loading times. All of this is truly narrowing the gap between consoles and the PC Master Race, which is honestly a glorious thing. Xbox Game Pass is something I'm honestly heavily looking into, as the price, library, and support for PC makes the service look like a strong contender that may be worth it. Almost as worth it as 8k resolution, right guys?
Right?
