We keep hearing more and more about the next PlayStation and Xbox (or XboxES…?), as we are reaching the end of the current generation. There’s a lot to discuss…

A Reddit topic revealed a lot of potential information that were screencapped on Imgur. Microsoft is reported to be in talks with several studios to acquire them – Asobo Studio (A Plague Tale: Innocence), IO Interactive (Hitman), PlatinumGames (Bayonetta, Vanquish, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance…), Turtle Rock Studios (Evolve, Left 4 Dead), Bluepoint Games (they are more of a remaster dev team; Shadow of the Colossus PlayStation 4…), Relic Entertainment (Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War, Age of Empires IV…), and The Farm 51 (Get Even, World War 3…). There are more studios that weren’t named.

The post also writes the next Xbox specifications. Two models were mentioned. Lockhart (for streaming, meaning no disc drive!) for 249 dollars and Anaconda (the equivalent of the current Xbox One X) for 499:

CPU: Custom 8 cores / 16 Threads Zen 2 CPU

GPU: Custom NAVI @ 4+ / 12+ teraflops (Lockhart / Anaconda)

Memory: 12 / 16GB GDDR6

Storage: 1TB NVMe SSD @ 1+GB/s

DirectX Raytracing + MS AI

The post says the devkits will be sent out around April or May, and the launch window is set to be Holiday 2020 (the end of next year). Microsoft is rumoured to talk about raytracing at the next Game Developers Conference… but we saved the best for last. ALL XBOX CONSOLES MIGHT BE GETTING BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY! Xbox One, Xbox 360, and Xbox games would all be supported!

The launch titles were also mentioned by the post: : Halo Infinite (cross-gen title, meaning it would also surface on Xbox One as well), Forza Motorsport (8? no number was written; it would be the first raytracing game), Age of Empires IV (cross-gen), Perfect Dark, Killer Instinct 2, and Bleeding Edge (cross-gen). „And a few more surprises – the first year of the next Xbox will be the best lineup of all time. Some old franchises will return, new IPs from new devs, exclusive Japanese games, [an] exclusive Spy game, and more,” the post says. (A Spy game? Hmmm…)

On ResetEra, hmqq has mostly confirmed the post’s information: „About the Reddit leak: the hardware is partially true, [the] storage is true and raytracing is true, the Lockhart is not [the] streaming box, the Xbox SoC codename is Anubis, check AMD’s plan. Microsoft’s AI is not a part of the hardware, in other words, never heard of TPU or ASIC like it. How to implement Raytracing? Why they make a decision like Lockhart? See GDC 2019. Why is there still no DevKit? After GDC 2019.”

It’s hard to believe it all, but the PlayStation 5 was also mentioned in the post. Its price is set to be 400 dollars, and it’d have an AMD Zen 2 CPU with 8 cores / 16 threads, a GPU would be an 8+ TLOPS custom NAVI, there would be 12 GB of GDDR6 memory, and the storage would be a 1 TB SSD. There might be raytracing technology, too, and there’s no information about backward compatibility. The post says the console was set to launch at the end of this year (!!!), but it was delayed and might arrive early 2020. (If there will be no backward compatibility and Microsoft will achieve it, Sony might make a fatal mistake!)

All we say is that if Microsoft uses NVMe SSD (which uses a PCI Express slot, not a SATA connection…), the price would be significantly higher. We’ll see eventually if the leak is correct or not…

Source: WCCFTech