As part of the massive festival of hype that is the E3 events this month, Microsoft bought their A-game. in addition to all the other reveals at E3 2019, we got some welcome news about the new console coming from the gaming giant, codenamed Xbox Scarlett. The company officially announced Project Scarlett, also revealing specs and a release window.
The new generation of Xbox hardware is due out in late 2020, in time for the holidays. The hardware is based on a AMD processor and a new series of SSD drives which will massively improve load times compared to the sometimes irritating load times of the Xbox One. In addition, it uses GDDR6 memory for extreme bandwidth. The company claims that these new architectures will allow for massively improved performance, up to 8K resolutions and 120 FPS. The system even supports Ray Tracing lighting tech. The claim is that this new console is 4x the power of the Xbox One X.
This is incredible, given that the current gen still locks titles to 30 FPS in some cases.
And with Microsoft pushing hard into digital distribution, it’s likely that we’ll see increased storage capacity as well. And this is further supported by an idea that Microsoft announced concerning backwards compatibility on the new console. According to Xbox, “Thousands of games across four console generations will look and play best on Project Scarlett.”
This alone suggests that there could be a major push to bring the ENTIRE Xbox game lineup from the original Xbox, the 360, and a good portion of the One, all to one platform. Windows 10 is also pushing the same strategy in a way, bringing as many users as possible to one platform to ease development time and costs. Standardizing console gaming could also be really useful in this regard for game developers.
Finally, Microsoft making big pushes like the new all-digital Xbox One S and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate bringing many classic games to one platform also offers some synergy with the idea of having all their games on one system.
We don’t know what the price of this beast will be though, although somewhere in the $500 range, given that the Xbox One X currently sits at around $350, and we can reasonably expect the price to be a fair bit higher on this new iteration.
