so it's been about six years since we got a new console generation from
microsoft xbox watch tv tv tv tv
and although we've seen a couple of upgraded xbox one models we're finally
going to see an all new xbox around the 2020 holiday season that redmond has
dubbed project scarlet
and although the name is a lot less intense than 2017's project
powerful scorpio ever made
scarlett is being billed as a major leap forward for console gaming but in an era
where high-end gaming pcs are still running absolute circles around consoles
what can we realistically expect so specs wise project scarlet features a
system on a chip in this case meaning a CPU and GPU in one package that is
supposed to be four times as powerful as the one in the xbox one x now the one x
was actually a pretty capable piece of hardware at launch compared to similarly
priced pcs as you can check out in this video from our sister channel however
even though its selling point was 4k gaming the one x also had some
limitations on frame rates as well as whether it could natively render 4k in
many titles some games were too intense for the one x to deliver true 4k the way
a pc would and so instead it used checkerboard rendering and other
upscaling tricks to give a pseudo 4k gaming experience
it wasn't real so back to project scarlett microsoft is
now promising that its new console will deliver 8k capability
and it does make some sort of intuitive sense that it could do so i mean four
times the power might be able to deliver four times the resolution right that's
how math works but while we think there might be some games that will run in 8k
especially considering how microsoft might be able to optimize its first
party titles it's very difficult to imagine that we're going to be getting
native 8k at high frame rates in games
to dig a little deeper consider that 8k is a challenge for even the highest end
pc graphics cards these days and it's hard to imagine that four times as
powerful means the GPU will be able to spit out four times as many frames per
second given that the top-end gpus on the market right now only have about
twice the raw rendering power of the rx 580 which is probably the closest
desktop equivalent to the one x's GPU
and of course price is going to constrain just how powerful of a chip
microsoft can put in project scarlett the one x's msrp of 499 us dollars is
already a little high for a console and microsoft has hinted that scarlett might
be even more expensive but there's a large difference between what a pc
gaming enthusiast would be willing to pay for a GPU and what a console gamer
would tolerate before they decided it was just too much especially considering
8k tvs aren't exactly cheap okay guys so
all that said i wouldn't expect native 8k in very many games and i certainly
wouldn't expect to see it at over about 30 frames per second except in maybe one
or two highly optimized titles although microsoft is pitching 120 hertz
capabilities i'd only expect that at lower resolutions but one thing that
might be more useful across the board is scarlett's incorporation of variable
refresh rate technology which has been around for a while now on pcs in the
form of g-sync and freesync although console games have been notorious for
being locked at relatively low frame rates this could definitely make quite a
few titles look smoother especially at lower resolutions provided you have a
compatible tv which aren't common on the market yet but
graphical fidelity is only part of the story here project scarlet is also going
to feature an SSD and microsoft claims that the SSD will
give 40 times the performance which suggests that it will be a pci express
SSD and that should significantly cut down on loading times and other
frustrating delays however pci express
ssds aren't cheap so it's anyone's guess how spacious they'll be or if microsoft
will also include a traditional hard drive for spillover storage and if the
SSD tends to fill up quickly you may end up buying some of your games on good
old-fashioned optical disks as microsoft has already announced that project
scarlett won't be all digital and an optical drive will almost certainly
introduce more latency or longer loading times then of course there's the fact
that it looks like scarlett will be tightly integrated with microsoft's game
streaming service xcloud given that microsoft has already invested quite a
bit in cross-platform gaming with projects like its play anywhere
initiative it looks like scarlett is going to emphasize cloud streaming
though it isn't clear if streamed games would partially leverage a local
console's hardware for some extra power and on the topic of power will project
scarlet have enough power for vr
based on what's under the hood it appears that it will though we also know
that microsoft hasn't shown a whole lot of enthusiasm for bringing vr to the
xbox however with the popularity of playstation vr and the fact that there's
still about a year and a half to go before scarlett hits the shelves i
wouldn't be surprised if microsoft does try a little harder in the vr space to
compete with sony's upcoming playstation 5 which has many of the same
specifications as scarlet hopefully those two consoles find a way to
differentiate themselves from each other in a meaningful way
other than which one ends up offering the better black friday bundle
all right that's it for this episode of tech wiki thanks for watching guys like
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