Xbox Series X: What's in Microsoft's new console?

If you often graze on these pages, you probably already know the name of Daniel Ahmad, an analyst for Niko Partners on the Asian market and an internationally renowned leaker who over and over again released information ahead of time.

ZhugeEX, name by which he is known on Twitter, did not have time to publish a small teaser containing new information on the Xbox Series X, which Microsoft has decided to do all by itself, officially releasing a considerable amount of information that best paint the appearance and potential of the new Redmond home console.

Using the experts from Digital Foundry the company has released an hour of content and several posts on the official blog to unravel the mists about the new console. Finally we have a complete review of the hardware components of the next gen console Microsofwith them we also have an overview of the new technologies that will be used by the company for next generation video games.

No more chatting, let's see together what we are talking about and for what reasons we may be interested in buying a Xbox Series X.

Xbox Series X - Technical Specifications

Here are the technical specifications of the new console from Microsoft

• CPU: 8x Zen 2 Cores at 3.8GHz (3.6GHz with SMT);
• But by the full GPU acceleration tech: 12 TFLOPs, 52 CUs at 1.825GHz, Custom RDNA 2;
• DIE dimensions: 360.45 mm2;
• Processo productive: TSMC 7nm Enhanced;
• Memory: 16GB GDDR6;
• Memory Bandwidth: 10GB at 560GB/s, 6GB at 336GB/s;
• Internal Memory: 1TB Custom NVMe SSD;
• IO Throughput: 2.4GB/s (Raw), 4.8GB/s (Compressed);
• Expandable memory: 1TB Expansion Card;
• Support for external drives: USB 3.2 HDD Support;
• Optical Drive: 4K UHD Blu-ray Drive;
• Technical objectives of the console: 4K a 60fps – fino a 120fps;

The processor is a product AMD with 7 core dedicated to games and one dedicated to the operating system; in case of need the processor can activate a hyperthreading-like mode and become a 16 core with clock limited to 3.6 GHz.

The video card is always a product of AMD and has performance comparable to that of an ultra-high-end video card for PC, navigating for teraflops between a Nvidia 2080 and a 2080Ti; Ironically AMD does not have a tab on yet PC with such performance

The ram compartment of the device consists of 16GB di GDDR6, with two different transmission speeds. 10GB have a 560GB / S bandwidth while the remaining 6GB have 336GB / S bandwidth.

It is also very important to underline the type of storage with which Xbox will appear on the market.
Permanently abandoned hard drives, la next gen di Microsoft will use some SSD Nvme custom for data archiving; these SSD sthey will go very fast and made by Seagate specifically for the company.

To try to nullify the data transmission problems that arise when SSDs heat up, Microsoft has tried to work on dissipation and on the creation of custom products, able to withstand temperatures better and work better at above average temperatures.

Xbox Series X will arrive on the market with a NVME SSD integrated da 1 terabyte but it will be possible to add a second one by buying another; these SSDs will be sold in the form of a similar pendrive applicable on the back of the console.

Xbox Series X - what new technologies will the console use?

Ray tracing made in AMD

One of the most interesting news of the whole package is certainly the presence of Ray Tracing, on console, through the exploitation of libraries DXR. Xbox Series X will have dedicated hardware for this task and this will ease the calculations that otherwise would have gone to the video card by dozens of teraflops.

This choice on the one hand allows the console to bring out practically about 25 Teraflops of power, on the other hand it will allow the gamer to enjoy realistic and dynamic lighting for the first time within a fixed environment such as that of a home console.

Digital Foundry has however stressed that the arrival of ray tracing within the console environment will lead to drops in performance because the GPU shaders will still have a lot of work to do in addition to managing the lighting; according to them this will still be an interesting environment for developers who will find themselves having to deal with the possibility of working on a fixed environment, with powerful hardware and with the maximum possible support from the manufacturer.

It is plausible to think that over the next few years of the console's life, many developers will end up coming up with innovative techniques that can improve the performance of hardware ray tracing on next-generation video games.

Because it will be nice to have a super fast SSD.

What does the presence of a Super fast SSD inside Xbox Series X?
Well, it can be used as virtual memory for numerous applications, lightening the load on the ram for specific things.

As we have already said theSSD Custom and MicrosofThe Seagate built it looks like an old USB stick, is made of metal and has an interesting dissipation system that places it a step above the competition, avoiding the problems of overheating.

The real revolution is not to be found in the brute technique but in how the characteristics of theSSD have been used in tandem with the capabilities of the new console.

The chip of Xbox Series X has some custom hardware that will be used to make the most of theSSD and the software will also have some API specifications that will allow to transform this device into a revolutionary object

The high speed of the‘SSD in essence it will allow the engine to fishing the assets and data instead of always having to go through the RAM.

This is the first component of what Microsoft has defined velocity architecture and which will represent a significant step forward compared to the previous generation of gaming.

The data will be decompressed by a hardware decompression block, that is a chip dedicated only to this task that will take care of lightening the load from the CPU.

This piece of hardware supports libraries zlib and is capable of using a new algorithm called BCPack, dedicated specifically to the compression of textures (which usually represent the bulk of the data of a video game).

Finally we find Directstorage, an extension of the DirectX which takes care of relieving the compression and decompression data from the CPU transforming processes into very light operations from a computational point of view. According to the data released by the company, thanks to Directstorage, the workload goes from 5 Cpu Zen 2 a 1/10 of a single CPU.

The convenience of the quick resume.

One of the features on which Microsoft has decided to focus more for its new console is the optimization of memory for the purpose of greater performance.

Starting from research done by Microsoft about the amount of memory that was unnecessarily occupied when playing the video games of the past generation, the company has started to build an infrastructure whereby using the SSD's high read and write speed it is possible to minimize this waste.

The result is known as SFS or Sampler Feedback Streaming, a technique that allows the Velocity Architecture to marry the demands of the GPU with little waste, intelligently loading the textures and taking care to lighten the workloads of the rest of the hardware.

The sum of these features will allow Xbox One X to have a feature like Quick resume, or like the ability to start different video games starting from savestates (or quick saves) in about six seconds. In essence, by abandoning a video game, the system will save the ram on the SSD, starting to load the data of the next title.

In video made by Digital Foundry you can see how the system is able to switch within thirty seconds overall from Forza Motorsport 7 a The Cave, passing through State of decay ed Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice.

The same State Of Decay 2 was taken into consideration regarding the speed of starting the game: su Xbox Series X the game starts in just over five seconds, on Xbox One X it takes over thirty seconds.

According to the calculations made by Microsoft, this whole system will have a limited impact on the actual size of the SSD. Considering that video games have 13.5 GB of RAM at their disposal (with 2.5 remaining for the operating system and other things), Microsoft has stated that the entire system will steal just 40GB of space from the SSD.

Less lag for everyone.

Among the things that Microsoft says he has significantly improved there is also the input lag of the commands and the screen tearing of his video games. To do this Microsoft has made a good effort and has rewritten all the software input management, in order to be able to deploy more efficient and powerful resources.

Il Dynamic Latency Input for example, it is the name of the algorithm that will take care of lowering the input lag between wireless controller and console to a couple of milliseconds (usually the input lag for such a configuration is equal to 8 milliseconds). To do this, all inputs of your controller will be equipped with timestamp and they will be sent just before the game we need them.

Il Dynamic Latency Input will perform at its best by pairing Xbox Series X with a screen Hertz 120 and a cable HDMI 2.1; this will allow the player to have the best possible feeling of control by making the most of all the features of the console.

The Xbox Series X approach to old video games.

One of the big questions that accompanies all the announcements of the new videogame generation is certainly that of backwards compatibility. We already know that Microsoft, in this field, it is certainly the company that has moved the most, already offering backwards compatibility with many previous generation video games on Xbox One.

Xbox Series X will be backwards compatible with most of the older video games released for the Microsoft console e with virtually all peripherals (This gives further sense to the presence of USB-A ports on the console, a standard a little older than USB-C).

In addition to this, the Digital Foundry report sheds light on the extent of backward compatibility by announcing some very interesting features.

In prime Xbox Series X will be able to play Xbox One games better how they ran on the original console, thanks to an injection of extra power due to the hardware and the complete absence of emulation.

The company is working on creating a library of games belonging to the Xbox One catalog that will come run from the new console upscaled up to 4K, thanks to machine learning algorithms.
Microsoft he has mentioned several times that as a basis for this project he plans to use a technique called Heutchy Method.

Another very interesting feature concerns the implementation of HDR in virtually any video game released on Microsoft consoles.

Using an improved version of the system HDR di Gears 5 and mixing it with different algorithms of Machine Learning the company is developing a system that will allow the console to generate HDR lighting on any video game, regardless of its age.

The video proof is self-evident, thanks also to the help of a heatmap, and it shows Halo 5 (released in 2016) e Fusion frenzy (released in 2002), both in HDR and 4K resolution.

Some technologies that Microsoft is setting up could help too Xbox Series X to become the leading console from the point of view of accessibility, allowing specific algorithms to improve the readability of texts by varying their colors or changing their size.

Playback on Xbox Series X will be something never seen before.

Controller matters.

The company also unveiled the new controller for its console. The Xbox joypad Series X seems to be the refined and improved version of the one for Xbox One, with better ergonomics and some stylistic changes.

The controller in question will have optimized connectivity between devices and will have the aforementioned reduced latency. In terms of feeling, the controller bumpers will change, this time more rounded and the Dpad has also changed, with more finishing and a more precise design.
Ergonomically speaking the grip has been improved, rounding the parts close to the triggers and improving the grip of the thumb on the aforementioned Dpad.

The new controller will be compatible with yes Xbox Series X but also with a whole host of other devices. You will be able to use the controller on Xbox One, Xbox One WILL e Xbox One X Without to forget PC, Android e iOs. The controller will have less energy consumption due to the presence of the link Bluetooth Low Energy and it will load in no time, given the presence of a door USB-C.