While Sony has been playing suspiciously coy about the finer details of the PlayStation 5, Microsoft has been dropping morsels of Xbox Series X information all over the place. After catching us all off guard with a hardware reveal during The Game Awards 2019, we now have an official breakdown of what’s going on under the hood. Thanks to an official blog post from Xbox boss Phil Spencer himself, we have a list of the major tech powering the Xbox Series X.
As we all know, teraflops are the most crucial measurement of ultimate video game speciness, and Xbox Series X has 12 of them. To be more serious, it’s worth pointing out that Google famously announced Stadia’s tech currently runs around 10 teraflops (versus current gen’s consoles hovering around just over half that), so the ante has officially been upped there. With that kind of power comes several new features to enhance the power and speed of console gaming. The Xbox Series X will include hardware accelerated ray tracing, as well as a function called Variable Rate Shading that allows for custom rendering priorities to make games run more efficiently.
The Xbox Series X will also have a full backwards compatibility suite, moving from the efforts that debuted on the Xbox One family. Speaking of Xbox One, developers and publishers will also have the option for Smart Delivery, a service Microsoft is offering that allows a single game purchase to detect which platform it’s being used on, therefore which assets to install. The last marquee feature currently advertised is an expansion of quick resume, to allow for more than one game to be played at a time.
Source: Xbox Official