JULY 2019 PCWorld 19respectively, with blazing-fast GDDR
memory. We were told it’s four times as
powerful as the Xbox One X, which already
had the capabilities of a GeForce GTX 1060—
pretty damned impressive for a console. And
yes, it will support adaptive sync variable
refresh rate technology as well as hardware-
accelerated ray tracing.
The rest is more meaningless. Microsoft
touted the capability for both 8K resolutions
and 120 frames per second framerates, but
it’s doubtful many developers will take
advantage of either of those. Presumably
media will output at 8K, but few games will
hit that resolution natively. And developers
are notoriously reticent to take advantage of
higher frame rates on consoles, even when
they have the option. The Xbox One outputs
at 60 frames per second, but most
developers opt for 30 frames per second
with better graphics. I expect Project Scarletthe started
discussing the
next-generation
Xbox, a pointed
change of
direction for the
company that
wanted to be in
all things
entertainment
when the Xbox
One launched six
years ago. No
scope creep here, no mixed messages.
Project Scarlett is about games.
And the big leap forward is...SSDs. Just
like Sony’s next-gen PlayStation 5 (go.
pcworld.com/sps5), it seems Microsoft’s
putting a huge emphasis on the SSD, instead
of the old, slow hard drives in the Xbox One
and PlayStation 4. The way they’re pitching it
to gamers is “No load times,” which is
obviously a huge benefit that we’ve had on
PCs for quite a while now. It’ll be neat to see
the SSD become the baseline spec, though,
moving forward, with developers hopefully
designing around the SSD and seamless
worlds in a way they couldn’t when they were
splitting the difference between console and
PC hardware.
Microsoft didn’t give us much in the way
of hard specs, but the core of Scarlett is once
again AMD-based, built off the Zen 2 and
Navi CPU and GPU architectures,