Quick booting, reduced loading times, better frame rates, strong backwards compatibility – the Xbox Series X seems to go all-in.
VentureBeat’s Jeff Grubb claims, „My overall takeaway is that Xbox Series X should instantly improve the quality of many of the games in your library. However, many games that have locked framerates or resolutions likely won’t see much of an improvement to traditional rendering. They will, however, see improvements like the machine-created HDR.” Thanks to the SSD, the booting is nearly instant, the loading times are cut massively, and the user interface is faster to navigate. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice had an almost stable 60 FPS frame rate, which is superior to the Xbox One X’s performance (average 37 FPS).
„Thanks to the Velocity architecture, a USB solid-state drive is significantly faster than a USB hard drive. The bottleneck is now the USB connection and not any of the I/0 throughput inside the Xbox itself (which was the case with the Xbox One and PS4). I was able to load Assassin’s Creed: Origins in 10.77 seconds from an external USB SSD, which was only a smidge slower than the 10.15 seconds for the internal Xbox Series X SSD. A USB HDD drive, meanwhile, took nearly three times as long at 30.22 seconds,” Grubb added.
IGN reports that even though the Xbox Series X is marketed to come with a 1 TB SSD, we will only have 802 GB of usable storage: the rest is held for the operating system and the system files. 802 is less than what the PlayStation 5 will offer (825 GB). You can buy a 920 GB expansion for the storage, but it will cost 220 dollars. We have no idea what the Xbox Series S‘ situation is in this aspect.
The Verge noted that the loading times (recorded on an Xbox One X) dropped significantly: Destiny 2 went from 112 seconds (1 minute, 52 seconds) to 43, Red Dead Redemption 2 dropped from 95 to 52, and Sea of Thieves cut the loading from 81 to 20 seconds, respectively, even without including the Xbox Series X enhancements. GameSpot noted that Red Dead Redemption’s loading time was severely chopped from 128 seconds to just 38.
The testers could play online against Xbox One players in first-party titles, and the Quick Resume function, according to The Verge, could work with up to five games, allowing almost instant resuming of games. And the Digital Foundry analysis called the backwards compatibility extreme. The Xbox Series X and the Xbox Series S will launch on November 10 (500/300 USD/EUR, respectively).
Source: WCCFTech, Gamesindustry
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