There will no fancy announcement for Microsoft’s next gaming machine, so the company has revealed the full specs for its Xbox Series X console today, and it includes support for removable storage and much faster load times for games. The software giant will adopt the use of a custom AMD Zen 2 CPU with eight cores clocked at 3.8GHz each, a custom AMD RNDA 2 GPU with 12 teraflops and 52 compute units clocked at 1.825GHz each. This is all based on a 7nm process and includes 16GB of GDDR6 RAM with a 1TB custom NVME SSD storage drive.
Microsoft is using two mainboards on this Xbox Series X compact design, and the entire unit is cooled through air being pulled in from the bottom and pushed out at the top via a 130mm fan.
This new SSD support will also allow Xbox Series X owners to resume multiple games instantly and even resume titles after the Series X is rebooted for a system update. Game states will be saved directly to the system’s SSD, so you can resume days or even weeks later. Microsoft is demonstrating this quick resume feature, using what looks like the existing dashboard for the Xbox One.
Microsoft is also demonstrating some ray tracing aspects of the Xbox Series X today. Ray tracing will enable more realistic lighting changes to games, with improved shadows and cinematic effects. We haven’t seen enough ray-traced games on the PC side just yet, but Microsoft is showing off how the Xbox Series X can handle ray tracing in titles like Minecraft. Microsoft is also optimizing Gears 5 with higher resolution textures, fog, and particles counts, all running in 60fps in 4K.
All of this should reduce latency from when you press a button on an Xbox controller to when you see that movement show up on screen. Speaking of the controller, it’s now USB-C, uses AA batteries, and supports Bluetooth Low Energy. There’s also a new share button for sending clips and screenshots to friends, and existing controllers will work just fine on the new Xbox Series X.
Today’s spec unveiling comes ahead of Microsoft’s plans to fully detail the console to developers later this week. Microsoft is also planning to unveil more details about the games we’ll see for the Xbox Series X in June.
