Head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, has posted a blog post on Xbox Wire today outlining some key features of the upcoming Xbox Series X and in the process confirmed a few leaks that have appeared over the last few months. Now, the first major reveal is the confirmation that the console is going to deliver 12 teraflops of GPU performance. this puts the Series X GPU performance at twice that of an Xbox One X (6 teraflops) and slightly more than 8 times as powerful as Xbox One S (1.4 teraflops). Now teraflops aren’t created equally and even though these numbers are impressive as is the real performance gains are likely to be much more impressive. Especially when combining it with hardware accelerated raytracing and variable rate shading, 2 more features we already knew were coming to the next-gen box. no new details have yet been confirmed on the CPU side of the Series X but again it will be Zen 2 based making for a powerful experience over the current-gen Jaguar found in Xbox One’s and PS4’s.
Now as for gaming, there are a few new features discussed in the post that should be great to see in practice. First is the ability to suspend multiple games and resume them from the same place. this feature isn’t new and has been around on the Xbox One and PS4 for a number of years now but it is being expanded upon greatly. I think it is a safe bet to assume that the feature won’t work for online only titles, as is the case with the feature currently, but having a couple of single player sessions stored sounds pretty great to me. One of the most important aspects of today’s post is knowing that we are going to be getting cross-gen game purchase support for a number of titles including the upcoming Halo Infinite. Microsoft is implementing a new smart delivery system to ensure that when you download a game you get the best version available to you. This has me very curious as to how the content library will be laid out as it seems Microsoft is trying to keep repeat game entries as minimal as possible. Microsoft is encouraging developers to adopt this feature so you may discover you have access to a number of upgraded titles when the console launches later this year.
Backward compatibility was once again mentioned with support for all Xbox One games including currently available backwards compatible Xbox 360 and og Xbox titles. No news has been shared on how the Xbox 360 and og Xbox libraries will be expanded on for the future but this starting line is a fantastic one to be sure. Xbox Game Pass will still play an important role for the Xbox Series X moving forward and is confirmed for next gen. As anticipated, Halo Infinite will be included on the service the day of its release. As we continue our march towards next gen we can expect more little reveals like this to come our way. There is still a lot to learn about the Xbox Series X but having confirmation on a few of the rumors is pretty huge.
What do you think about today’s reveal?
