The Xbox One X Is The Smallest Xbox Ever, And The Most Powerful Console Ever

The Xbox One X Is The Smallest Xbox Ever, And The Most Powerful Console Ever

Microsoft just announced what we’ve all been waiting for: the birth of Project Scorpio, its much-teased next-generation console. It’s now called the Xbox One X, and it’s both the smallest Xbox ever built as well as the most powerful console ever — built for gaming on 4K TVs, in HDR, at a smooth 60fps.

The tech specs of the Xbox One X in Microsoft’s announcement mirror what have been teased and rumoured for a while now: built around around a 6-teraflop custom-designed GPU, the One X uses a 16-nanometre chip with 17 billion transistors and a custom-designed vapor chamber cooling system to keep it all cool.

It’s also somehow the smallest Xbox ever, besting even the Xbox One S and Xbox 360 Slim in size — in part due to that innovative cooling system, and the amount of effort Microsoft has put into making the new console highly integrated and streamlined. Its power and Xbox’s optimisation means that it is capable of outputting “true 4K” — something Xbox is talking up a lot — at 60fps and with HDR support.

The “Xbox family” now comprises the One X and the One S, with both being sold simultaneously at different price points. The One X is slightly slimmer, and seems like it’ll be a fair bit more portable for those that don’t want it to live under the TV forever. It still ships with that same Xbox controller that we’ve seen since the original One was released.

The One X is significantly more powerful than its main competitor the PlayStation 4 Pro, which has around two thirds the graphical power at 4.2 Teraflops. The new Xbox’s custom GPU also runs at 1172MHz versus the 4 Pro’s 911MHz and the One S’s 853MHz, although you can’t directly compare apples for apples especially since the consoles’ graphics architecture is different.

Microsoft’s newest console is built for 4K gameplay and the latest 4K HDR TVs, but it’ll also be a potential investment for anyone with an existing 1080p TV — supersampling lets the new Xbox One X render graphics at 4K and then downscale it to 1080p, showing more detail than anatively 1080p-rendered video.

Similarly, existing Xbox One and 360 games will run better on the One X due to its extra power; the extra power can either make 1080p and 900p titles run at 4K on the One X or the titles themselves will be updated to suit — Microsoft teased a new ‘Xbox One X Enhanced’ logo that makes this much clear..

Even humble games like Minecraft are getting the 4K treatment, as well as a host of updates besides. Xbox’s E3 press conference has included an absolute swathe of new titles, like Sea of Thieves The Australian price of the Xbox One X is $649, a price that’s actually cheaper than the One X’s international $US499 price point.

Read more on Kotaku here. We’ll be having our first hands-on with the One X as soon as Xbox’s event itself is over, so stay tuned for our early impressions.

Gizmodo traveled to E3 2017 as a guest of Xbox.


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