DECEMBER 2020 PCWorld 121acknowledge that Series X may be hard to
find, too. But not as hard (go.pcworld.com/
hard).
PC-LIKE FRAME RATES,
ON THE CHEAP
On paper, the Xbox Series X shapes up well
against older gaming cards. (For the full Xbox
Series X specs [go.pcworld.com/sxsp], you
can refer to our previous story.) AMD’s last-gen
discrete graphics card, the $400 Radeon RX
5700 XT (go.pcworld.com/rdnx), includes 40
compute units at a typical game clock speed of
1,755MHz. The new Radeon RX 6800 (go.
pcworld.com/rx68) packs 60 CUs and a
1,815MHz game clock. The Xbox Series X
includes 52 CUs which run at a game clock
speed of 1.825GHz. If AMD sold a Radeon RX
6700, the Xbox Series X would probably be it.
What all those numbers mean is that in the
real world, the Xbox Series X finally feels like
what you’d expect of a PC. The Xbox One
was designed for 1080p gaming; the Xbox
One X introduced 4K gaming. The Xbox
Series X? 4K gaming at PC-like frame rates.
Games like Rare’s pirate simulator Sea of
Thieves once felt a bit sluggish, even on the
Xbox One X. On the Series X, a flick of the
thumbstick whips your perspective around
smoothly. Microsoft claims Sea of Thieves is
optimized for 60 frames per second at 4K
resolutions, and I buy that argument.
The Xbox Series X was actually designed
for games to offer 4K/120 gamingRare’s Sea of Thieves looks just as marvelous as ever on the Xbox Series X. The improvement this
generation brings is 60 frames per second at 4K resolution, with HDR enabled.