Xbox Series X Full Specs and Breakdown Goes Hands on!
Believe the hype, the hype is real!!
Today we saw the release of the full breakdown of specifications for the upcoming Xbox Series X, the next generation console / beast from Microsoft.
There has been some very lucky people that have had their hands on it, built it, pulled it apart, benchmarked it and even played it. One of those is of course Digital Foundry.
Digital Foundry is one of those groups who are ridiculously in depth, so much so unfortunately that the everyday gamer that doesn't understand the technical jargon will get lost along the way. Don't get me wrong, their information is second to none but, it can be confusing.
This is where we come in. I have watched, I have read and I have decoded what I can to give you a quick breakdown of exactly what we can expect from Xbox's next flagship model.
So let's look at comparisons to begin,
Xbox Series X
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Xbox One X
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Xbox One S
|
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CPU
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8x Zen 2 Cores at 3.8GHz (3.6GHz with SMT)
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8x Custom Jaguar Cores at 2.13GHz
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8x Custom Jaguar Cores at 1.75GHz
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GPU
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12 TFLOPs, 52 CUs at 1.825GHz, Custom RDNA 2
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6 TFLOPs, 40 CUs at 1.172GHz, Custom GCN + Polaris Features
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1.4 TFLOPS, 12 CUs at 914MHz, Custom GCN GPU
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Die Size
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360.45mm2
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366.94mm2
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227.1mm2
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Process
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TSMC 7nm Enhanced
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TSMC 16nmFF+
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TSMC 16nmFF
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Memory
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16GB GDDR6
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12GB GDDR5
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8GB DDR3, 32MB ESRAM
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Memory Bandwidth
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10GB at 560GB/s, 6GB at 336GB/s
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326GB/s
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68GB/s, ESRAM at 219GB/s
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Internal Storage
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1TB Custom NVMe SSD
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1TB HDD
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1TB HDD
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IO Throughput
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2.4GB/s (Raw), 4.8GB/s (Compressed)
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120MB/s
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120MB/s
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Expandable Storage
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1TB Expansion Card
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-
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-
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External Storage
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USB 3.2 HDD Support
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USB 3.2 HDD Support
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USB 3.2 HDD Support
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Optical Drive
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4K UHD Blu-ray Drive
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4K UHD Blu-ray Drive
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4K UHD Blu-ray Drive
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Performance Target
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4K at 60fps - up to 120fps
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4K at 30fps - up to 60fps
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1080p at 30fps up to 60fps
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At the base level the Xbox Series X is twice the power of the Xbox One X
"12 TFLOPs was our goal from the very beginning. We wanted a minimum doubling of performance over Xbox One X to support our 4K60 and 120 targets. And we wanted that doubling to apply uniformly to all games, "To achieve this, we set a target of 2x the raw TFLOPs of performance knowing that architectural improvements would make the typical effective performance much higher than 2x. We set our goal as a doubling of raw TFLOPs of performance before architectural improvements were even considered - " explains Andrew Goossen.
Now I still technically cannot explain to anyone what a Teraflop is, might as well be a Parsec to me. At it's core it is how much pure graphical grunt is being utalised via the GPU. However with the advancements in GPU technology and particularly AMD's RDNA architecture means we are now getting more performance per Teraflop.
The big thing that so many of us have been holding out for is Ray Tracing support. Ray Tracing is relatively new to most of us and what it boils down to is the way in which light reacts to the area it is being cast and the surfaces a big factor in visual realism for games.
The Xbox Series X supports hardware accelerated ray tracing support and with the help of parallel processing power of the GPU and CPU you will effectively get 25TF of power to process ray tracing.
Check out these images below from Minecraft, no special shaders are used just ray tracing.
The best way to look at this is I would assume most have heard about the new beastly GPU's the RTX-2080. The Xbox Series X is comparable to the performance found on them. That puts it in the realm of around a $4,000 PC in Australia.
During the design and build Microsoft has kept true to three core principles.
- Power:
With Xbox Series X, it’s not just about making games look better. It’s
about making games play better too.
- Speed:
Ensuring we enabled gamers to spend more time playing and less time
waiting.
- Compatibility:
Ensuring the thousands of games on Xbox One, including Xbox 360 and
original Xbox games, will play even better on Xbox Series X.
At first glance I would say they have gone above and beyond.
There are two things I have question marks over and I would love to hear your thoughts.
- No Thermal Throttling on the CPU.
Now I don't know enough about this to fully understand but I have heard it before used to describe the red ring of death and the yellow light of death. I am sure the cooling is more than sufficient, I am sure time will tell though.
- Expansion Card slot.
Proprietary items on any system are never a good thing unless they are heavily regulated. right now to expand storage we update the internal drive of plus in an external hdd that fits with the required specs nothing to do with a manufacturer. The expansion card is cool, and a bit of a throw back to memory card days, but it may just prove a sticking point for some gamers.
I hope I have given you some insight into the beast that is the Xbox Series X!
Stay tuned for more info as it comes through.
Snoogs
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