Three months after its initial unveiling at The Game Awards 2019, the full specs for the Xbox Series X have been released.
In a blog post on the official Xbox website, Microsoft has gone into detail on everything the next-generation console has to offer.
“Xbox Series X is the biggest generational leap of SOC [System on a Chip] and API design that we’ve done with Microsoft, and it’s really an honor for AMD to be a trusted Microsoft partner for this endeavor,” Sebastien Nussbaum, Corporate VP & Sr. Fellow for Products & Technologies at AMD, told Xbox Wired. “The Xbox Series X is going to be a beacon of technical innovation leadership for this console generation and will propagate the innovation throughout the DirectX ecosystem this year and into next year.”
The system will come with a 1TB solid-state-drive (SSD) to allow faster game loads without compromising on storage space. There is also an extra port on the console that will be exclusively for external storage expansion of up to 1TB via a custom-made Microsoft SSD.
In addition to the storage, the console will see older titles see performance upgrades when played on the system. For example, Minecraft — a decade-old title — will see benefits from ray tracing, which is meant to simulate light and sound more realistically.
Other games like Gears 5 and even original Xbox titles like 20-year-old Fusion Frenzy will see benefits from the addition of HDR to give the games a fresher, more modern look.
The other main feature that Microsoft continued to hammer home was the ability to quickly bounce between titles and resume games where you leave them. With the aforementioned addition of an SSD and the company’s Xbox Velocity Architecture, players will be able to instantly access up to 100GB of game assets. That means you’ll no longer have to wait for games to load large areas, instead large scale games such as open-world titles can have areas load seamlessly for players. The technology will also let players switch between a game of Madden and The Witcher. You can just simply bounce between the two with little-to-no wait.
Microsoft also touched briefly on improving overall input latency with new technology to make response times faster than ever before.
There’s plenty more under the hood of the upcoming system, and you can check out the full specs for the Xbox Series X below.
| CPU | 8x Cores @ 3.8 GHz (3.6 GHz w/ SMT) Custom Zen 2 CPU |
| GPU | 12 TFLOPS, 52 CUs @ 1.825 GHz Custom RDNA 2 GPU |
| Die Size | 360.45 mm2 |
| Process | 7nm Enhanced |
| Memory | 16 GB GDDR6 w/ 320b bus |
| Memory Bandwidth | 10GB @ 560 GB/s, 6GB @ 336 GB/s |
| Internal Storage | 1 TB Custom NVME SSD |
| I/O Throughput | 2.4 GB/s (Raw), 4.8 GB/s (Compressed, with custom hardware decompression block) |
| Expandable Storage | 1 TB Expansion Card (matches internal storage exactly) |
| External Storage | USB 3.2 External HDD Support |
| Optical Drive | 4K UHD Blu-Ray Drive |
| Performance Target | 4K @ 60 FPS, Up to 120 FPS |
The one thing that wasn’t announced, however, was the price. That is still a sticking point with many gamers and is something that many are hoping to get answered very soon.
The Xbox Series X is slated for a Holiday 2020 release, though things may change as the world deals with the coronavirus pandemic.
