MAY 2020 PCWorld 39single-thread performance. The
chip will run at 3.8GHz if a game
sticks to the physical CPU cores,
or 3.66GHz if developers open
up the full 16 threads.
Considering that four cores
were the norm in PC gaming just
a few scant years ago, having
eight cores as the new console
standard—the baseline target for
game developers—is a big deal,
especially as Sony’s rival
PlayStation 5 (go.pcworld.com/
pls5) will also deploy a Ryzen
chip. This should directly make PC games
better once developers wrap their heads (and
engines) around the new capabilities.
The same “rising tide floats all boats”
applies to the Xbox Series X’s storage system,
too. While current-gen consoles ship with
abysmally slow spinning hard drives,
Microsoft’s next-gen behemoth will come
stock with a blazing-fast 1TB NVMe solid-state
drive, with the ability to double that via an
expansion slot. Adios, atrocious world
loading times.
Better yet, at least part of the
technological backbone behind the Xbox
Series X’s blisteringly fast “Velocity
Architecture” is coming to Windows PCs, too.
My colleague Mark Hachman took a deeper
dive into what we know about the
DirectStorage I/O system (go.pcworld.com/
dsio) and other details so far.
And finally, the custom GPU based on
AMD’s upcoming RDNA2 graphics
architecture looks like an utter beast. It packs
in a whopping 52 compute units at a locked
1.825GHz clock speeds. By comparison,
AMD’s most powerful current discrete
graphics card, the $400 Radeon RX 5700 XT
(go.pcworld.com/rxxt), wields just 40 CUs at
a typical game clock speed of 1,755MHz. So
the custom graphics inside the Xbox Series X
are both bigger and faster than AMD’s current
PC champion (though bigger discrete
graphics cards [go.pcworld.com/bgcd] are
on the horizon). The Xbox Series X will also
support DirectX-based real-time ray tracing,
variable rate shading, and mesh shaders,
matching the features provided by Nvidia’s
GeForce RTX 20-series GPUs (go.pcworld.
com/20se).
Exciting stuff indeed. As per usual for a