Microsoft just revealed a ton of new info about the Xbox Series X

There will be no E3 this summer. And quite frankly, the future of just about every conference for the year looks to be in jeopardy, at best. Understandably, Microsoft is releasing most of the Xbox Series X info online in the meantime. A few weeks ago, it offered some key insights into the next-gen console and today it’s because with far and away its deepest dive yet.

A momentary respite, perhaps, from the news of the world, this morning brought four separate blog posts, a hands-on video and a whole lot of information for developers. Bookmark this glossary postin the meantime, if you need to cross reference any of the information referenced here or in the original post.

Microsoft just revealed a ton of new info about the Xbox Series X

Brian Heater@bheater / 3:11 pm WAT • March 16, 2020

There will be no E3 this summer. And quite frankly, the future of just about every conference for the year looks to be in jeopardy, at best. Understandably, Microsoft is releasing most of the Xbox Series X info online in the meantime. A few weeks ago, it offered some key insights into the next-gen console and today it’s because with far and away its deepest dive yet.

A momentary respite, perhaps, from the news of the world, this morning brought four separate blog posts, a hands-on video and a whole lot of information for developers. Bookmark this glossary postin the meantime, if you need to cross reference any of the information referenced here or in the original post.

At very least, it will help you sound a bit smarter when you explain all of this stuff to a loved one.

Okay, let’s start with the spec breakdown:

So, a custom eight-core 8 core AMD Zen 2 CPU and an RDNA 2-class GPU. “Xbox Series X is the biggest generational leap of SOC 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,” says Corporate VP Sebastien Nussbaum in the post.

Per the Digital Foundry deep dive,

[T]he Series X processor is actually capable of running four Xbox One S game sessions simultaneously on the same chip, and contains an new internal video encoder that is six times as fast as the more latent, external encoder used on current xCloud servers.

That’s coupled with the the GPU stuff we already knew about, including the promise of 12 teraflops of processing power, equating to double what the Xbox One X could do and eight times the original Xbox One. There’s Variable Rate Shading (VRS), which allows for the system to focus on given effects on screen and DirectX Raytracing for improved lighting, reflections and other fine touches.