In what is easily the most shocking reveal in the history of The Game Awards, Microsoft officially announced its next-gen Xbox near the beginning of the awards show. Xbox Series X is the name of the new console, and as you can see from the image above and the trailer below, it looks unlike any video game console we’ve ever seen before. Honestly, it looks more like a gaming desktop PC than it does like an Xbox One.
Of course, that’s rather appropriate, considering it will be an extraordinarily powerful machine. As Phil Spencer, Head of Xbox, explains on the Xbox Wire, the Xbox Series X delivers four times the power of the Xbox One X, and despite the potentially misleading image, supports both vertical and horizontal orientation.
In addition to the Xbox Series X, we also got our first glimpse of the new Xbox Wireless Controller, which incorporates the advanced d-pad of the Xbox Elite Series 2 controller, features a new share button, and has a new size and shape that should “accommodate an even wider range of people.” Best of all, the next-gen controller will be compatible with every Xbox One model and Windows 10 PCs, and it will ship in the box with the Xbox Series X.
I won’t even attempt to decipher all of the technical jargon Spencer shared, so here’s the relevant information:
From a technical standpoint, this will manifest as world-class visuals in 4K at 60FPS, with possibility of up to 120FPS, including support for Variable Refresh Rate (VRR), and 8K capability. Powered by our custom-designed processor leveraging the latest Zen 2 and next generation RDNA architecture from our partners at AMD, Xbox Series X will deliver hardware accelerated ray tracing and a new level of performance never before seen in a console. Additionally, our patented Variable Rate Shading (VRS) technology will allow developers to get even more out of the Xbox Series X GPU and our next-generation SSD will virtually eliminate load times and bring players into their gaming worlds faster than ever before.
As expected, the Xbox Series X will be backward compatible with every previous generation of Xbox games, but we were also given a sneak peek at one game we’ll see in the next generation from Ninja Theory:
