Site News: We Have An Xbox Series X

Are the airvents powerful enough to keep a malteaser airborne?

Awesome!!! Congrats guys!!

What does it taste like?

Looking forward to your review.

@FraserG https://twitter.com/jronald/status/1321437398757072896?s=20

interesting...

Ugh... Feels like everybody and their grandma got an XSX or PS5. Two more weeks of pain 😑

@FraserG You lucky devils...

Any word on official price target for the expansion cards yet? I've seen various mentions of it here and there, ranging from €100 - €200, so if you have anything sensible or factual to say about that, then I'm all ears...

If someone gets to keep the unit you guys should raffle off your own pre-order to someone who couldn't get their hands on a pre-order. I got mine do it's not a selfish request.

Also looking forward to hearing your thoughts. Dealer from RDX and Randal Thor git one as well today so I'm looking forward to their videos as they always uploaded on full resolution

@ThanosReXXX Hey man! Hope everything is well glad to see ya back!!!

@redd214 Thanks, very kind of you. Went through a bit of a rough patch (non-COVID related) but things are slowly improving again.

@ThanosReXXX glad things are looking up!

Nearly all Series X coverage so far has focused on framerates. I'd like to know if any open world games have used the extra power to extend the draw distance. Subnautica apparently has the draw distance still locked to Xbox One standards. Is that the same for all games?

Does Skyrim SE benefit noticeably?

@redd214 Haha, you and me both, man.

Please stop rubbing in our faces, we have to wait 13 days....

@hallower1980 Forza Horizon 4 next-gen update at launch is confirmed to have exactly what you are looking for. Also do checkout Gears 5 update, they have implemented lot of RDNA2 next-gen features, one of the only few titles right now with noticeable power draw.

Higher resolution textures
Improved anisotropic filtering
Higher-resolution volume fog
Higher quality depth of field
Extremely far draw distances with high level of object detail
Shadow resolution and shadow distance
High-quality screen-space reflections
Post processing improvements like bloom, lens flare, light shafts, ect.
That said, The Coalition is also working on some new Xbox Series X features, including Screen Space Global Illumination, higher particle counts, and yes, the ability to play MP at up to 120fps.
Contact Shadows
This allows extremely realistic shadowing as each pixel on screen traces back to the light source to eliminate any shadow biasing artifacts or fill in missing shadows.
Screen Space Global Illumination
Integrated from UE4 4.24 this feature allows us to achieve full realtime GI at 4K/60fps.
SSGI's AO pass replaces the more traditional SSAO giving a much more naturalistic broad real-time AO.
Higher particle counts
Our particle counts are 50% higher than PC Ultra spec.
Real-Time Cinematics in 4K 60fps
Xbox One X cinematics were 4K 30fps
120fps Multiplayer support

https://youtu.be/eQB91jVluT4

Awsome, Looking forward to the review..

Congratulations!

@FraserG We are glad to see Pure Xbox being successful! Well-deserved reward.

@ThanosReXXX He's back!! An XBox launch just seemed wrong without a certain titan around.

Expansion drives are $220 US 1TB for the Seagate. Additional vendors and sizes (and price drops) will become available as the generation goes on, supposedly.

@FraserG You got the easy job. I hear Sammy's still building the receiving dock to have enough overhead clearance to receive the PS5 he got. Should be ready by Spring.

@FraserG So glad for you guys ! But especially for us, as we're all looking for your reviews and impressions on our next console !

You really deserve this mark of recognition ! Best website about Xbox ever !

Keep up the good work, fellows !

@NEStalgia Why would be a problem finding space for this?

@Medic_Alert @NEStalgia @Thretosix Thanks, people!

But damn, that's a pretty steep price for a single TB. I know that solid state is more expensive than regular storage expansion options, but still.

Doesn't make it very attractive to dive right in after you've already paid around €500 - €600 for the console itself...

@Thretosix On a side note: I wouldn't be surprised if the final price in euros is ultimately the exact same figure as the amount in dollars.

Taxes and all that fun stuff...

@Medic_Alert Here's hoping that the internal drive will last long enough, space-wise, to accommodate for that.

I'm not really partial to installing/playing and then erasing games again. I always like to keep them installed so they're instantly available whenever I want to (re)play them.

@Medic_Alert True, and I was indeed already aware of the options for previous gen games, but in this scenario, I was purely considering new games, and seeing as these will more than likely be pretty hefty in size, I'll probably need to keep my next gen library a bit more modest, for the time being.

@Medic_Alert Oh, and I literally never sell any of my consoles or handhelds, so I'll keep playing my previous gen games on the 360 or on my One S, unless of course there's a significant benefit to playing them on the newer console.

But it would have to be a REALLY big difference for it to be able to persuade me.

@ThanosReXXX Yeah, remember the consoles are being heavily subsidized - they're paying us heavily to take these consoles. So paying "market price" for the SSD alone, ends up being almost half the console!

That's what I was kind of annoyed about with the current gen consoles. Not that they went SSD, SSD is fine, but that they had to go bleeding edge with NVMe v3 (XB) and NVMe v4 equivalent custom (PS5) - not all SSDs are that expensive but these are using the bleeding edge which costs a pretty penny. Supposedly they're not making much, if any profit on the drives...that's the actual cost.

PS5 OTOH is where the required drives don't even exist yet, will appear on compatibility lists, and Cerny said approved ones won't arrive until a little later.... The first POSSIBLY supported one is out and costs only $10 more than the XB drives. PS5 uses off the shelf PC NVMes (that are so bleeding edge fast enough ones don't really exist yet) so costs are a bit better value....roughly the same price for a drive roughly double the raw speed of the one in the XSX, and prices will probably fall faster than the XB ones. But the XB ones have a custom external interface to pay for and right now Seagate's the only MFR.

Unlike 360 though the interface isn't vendor exclusive and there will be "other manufacturers, and form factors." I'm picturing some kind of external PC NVMe bay connected by cable to the point or something in the future. They do say prices will fall....but they'll never be cheap during the generation. Most PC gamers aren't even using NVMes as game drives yet. Boot drives, yes, game drives, no.

The part that's most annoying is one of the best features of becoming a digital gamer with X1X was having my entire library at my fingertips at any time. Not going to happen with the new consoles....redownloads aplenty!

It's weird. PS5 uses stock PC parts (from an approved list that doesn't exist yet.) You pull the panel off and pop it onto the mobo. XSX uses a proprietary external memory stick type setup. You would have thought that would be reversed, right?

@FraserG Wow, that's really putting the screws to him!
......I'll show myself out.....

@NEStalgia "and right now Seagate's the only MFR"

Mother ***** *****?

All kidding aside though, that's probably exactly what I'd feel like if I would buy one of these drives at that price, so I'll either steal one somewhere or wait until after the generation has run half its course, in hopes of them actually having become considerably cheaper...

Just to be clear, I was only kidding about stealing one. Kind of a sarcastic nod to them perhaps some day becoming a steal...

As for re-downloading games, if you think you're having problems with that, just imagine what I'm going through right now: I had an external drive connected to my trusty Xbox 360, that was in dire need of replacement, because it started to act up. So, I bought a new one, copied all the content over (almost a TB's worth of data), and connected it to my console again, only to find that the drive wasn't recognized by the Xbox 360, and suggested for it to be formatted.

Guess I forgot that the Xbox 360 doesn't recognize NTFS drives, so it had to be formatted to FAT32...

So, I disconnected it again, and started to move the games over to the old drive again, through my PC. But well, you guessed it: during this procedure, my old external drive decided to give up the ghost, resulting in me losing roughly 700GB of data, and having only around 212GB left to move over from my new drive.

So, long story short: I had to buy yet another external drive, so I could salvage that data, seeing as I didn't have that much space left on my PC.

Next, I connected the now once again empty drive I bought earlier to my Xbox, formatted it, reconnected it to my PC, moved over the 212GB of leftover data from new drive nr. 2 and then connected that first drive to my Xbox 360 again.

And now I've already been busy for this entire weekend to re-download all the missing titles, or at least: the ones still available, because I've already run into several mentions of "content not available" without even having a single inkling of what title or demo is/was hidden behind that notification.

And even with all this time spent, I'm not even close to being halfway, because I'm sifting through my ENTIRE download history from the start of my Xbox 360 days.

I'm definitely NOT happy that Microsoft chose to remove the option to offer members to batch re-download older library titles from their own profile on the Xbox website, because the process is agonizingly slow on the console itself, as well as it having a limit on how many titles can be queued at once, so I have to do it in bite-sized stages, more or less.

I have never been more aware of how excruciatingly slow the Xbox 360 OS actually is, especially with these kinds of things. They have most certainly improved upon it in the current and upcoming generations...

@ThanosReXXX MFR = manufacturer. Though your version is also correct depending on the manufacturer in question.

Ouch, yeah it's been a looong time since I've booted a 360. Haven't really needed to with bc making it all better, but i still have them around. That's not a pleasant system to work with in that regard.

Not that 1tb (825gb for ps5!) Is going to be fun. It almost seems like we went from "everything should be digital"last gen to "let's just focus on discs and reinstall every time you change them"this gen ....

@NEStalgia All true about bc, but I also have quite a few non-bc titles, so that's why I need to keep the 360 around.

As for all digital still not being fully realized: honestly, not surprising to me at all. Not in the slightest.

Factoring in the amount of older gamers and/or users of legacy systems moving over to this generation, it's pretty clear to me that we're still quite a way's off from that reality, and obviously, Microsoft can't run the risk of alienating their existing user base (again).