Microsoft officially announces the next gen Xbox console during their conference at E3 2019. Called Project Scarlett, the new console is powered by AMD Zen 2 architecture (the newer architecture recently unveiled at Computex 2019). The GPU powering the console will be based on AMD’s Navi architecture and will be using high bandwidth GDDR6 memory. This will be the first console to support 8K resolution, real time ray tracing (which is done entirely using the hardware, for the first time ever), delivering upto 120 fps, and even faster and variable refresh rates of upto 144 Hz. The biggest change comes in the physical storage, which seems to have been replaced with a custom SSD engineered to improve loading times (and according to the announcement, they have achieved upto 50 times the Project Scarlett will be coming with backwards compatibility – meaning that you would be able to play your older games on the new console too.
Project Scarlett launches next year during the holidays. The console comes bundled with Halo Infinite.
The hardware they are planning to launch with is definitely ambitious. Hardware accelerated ray-tracing is very taxing, which becomes even more so when gamers are using the console for long hours with graphically intensive games. However, pulling 120 fps at 8k resolution will require some sheer computing power to pull off. The trailer claims the new SSD solution used is “upto forty times faster”, while also saying that the new console is “four times the power of the previous generation, the Xbox One X” – which will require quite some benchmarks for justification. It all comes to the Zen 2 and Navi benchmarks from AMD – and how they perform in actual games instead of test environments.
