— Doug – XBOX SERIES X (@Doug_DragoX) January 22, 2020
Xbox Series X
In my opinion, the console looks great, resembling a mini tower-like PC. This is a big change from console designs over the years where they have traditionally been horizontal-rectangular. Obviously there’s a big thermal management element to the design given the reported specs. The back is even more interesting with the pictures giving us a clear look at the ports. This was reported by Thurrott before and the pictures here confirm it. There are two USB ports, one optical audio port, an HDMI port, an ethernet port, and a power connector. The long port outlined by a white strip seems to be a debugging port and will probably be missing from the consumer units. This is similar to what is present on the Xbox One X, minus the “IR out” and “HDMI in”. These might be included in the consumer units, but we will see about that.
Microsoft Pitching Two Consoles For Next-Gen
We previously reported this, here’s a snippet from our coverage. The one in the pictures and revealed so far is the more premium series X console. With “Anaconda” we will finally see higher refresh rates in 1080p along with a respectable 4K experience, this unit will reportedly pack 12 teraflops of compute performance, a big jump over the Xbox One X’s 6 teraflops and approximately 3 times as much as the PS4 Pro. To put this number further into perspective, the RTX 2080 pushes around 11.3 teraflops. The cheaper console “Lockhart”, if it exists, hasn’t been revealed and we are yet to see any leaks on that front. Lockhart might carry a more traditional console look, given thermal constraints won’t be as high.
Next-Gen Features
Ray-traced games will reportedly debut on the new consoles, Microsoft introduced DirectX Raytracing on the Windows 12 API recently and they have been working on it for a while now (Yippee! for finally moving beyond traditional rasterization). Another big obvious addition will be NVMe SSDs, this is sorely missed on current-gen consoles but flash storage has only come down in price enough recently to make it a viable replacement for traditional HDDs. This will result in vastly improved game load times and a responsive UI among other things. This was confirmed a while back and we covered it here.
