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Xbox Series X release date
A bit of history: the original Xbox One went on sale in 2013, and only in 2016 an improved model appeared – Xbox One S. In 2017, Microsoft significantly updated the console with the release of Xbox One X.
What does it say? The five years that have passed since the announcement of the Xbox One is a decent amount of time for the company to think about releasing a new generation by 2019-2020. And Microsoft seems to agree. Head of Xbox Phil Spencer in an interview said that the new Xbox is already in development.
Before the Microsoft conference at E3 2019, there was little information about the next Xbox, regarding the same PS 5. On June 9, a corporation from Redmond revealed an approximate release date – 2020. And this is a “plus or minus” time for the release of the main competitors – the PlayStation 5 and the “post-console” Google Stadia.
The official release of the console took place on December 13, 2019 at the Game Awards event. They promise to tell the gaming press about the new console in more detail in early April 2020. Then there will be a special Microsoft conference in Los Angeles. However, sales of commodity consoles will begin at the end of 2020.
Finally, on September 9, 2020, Microsoft announced when it will start selling its set-top box. Pre-orders in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, South Korea, Sweden, the UK and the US start on September 22. The console will go on sale November 10th.
Xbox Series X Specifications
The appearance of the new console remained a secret until December 2019. Designers designed it in a minimalistic case in the form of a rectangular parallelepiped. At the top are vents with green illumination. On the front, you can find the power button. By the way, the optical drive for disks, which is located in the lower left part of the front panel, remained in the new generation. In general, the Xbox Series X looks more like a PC case than a console. According to the developers, the prefix can be installed both vertically and horizontally.
Obviously, the new Xbox will have improved processing performance and an updated graphics chip. Experts expect to see more and more games that allow you to comfortably play in high definition. Expectations were confirmed, if not to say that reality surpassed them.
So, at E3, Microsoft was told that the set-top box uses an AMD CPU based on the Zen 2 architecture and a Navi GPU based on the RDNA architecture with GDDR6 RAM. In other words, the computing capabilities of the set-top box are completely based on the Radeon hardware. The video accelerator, created jointly with Microsoft, will provide support for working with monitors with a resolution of 8K and a frame rate of up to 120 fps. In addition, powerful hardware will work with fashionable ray tracing. Moreover, the developers promise a certain possibility of sound with ray tracing (ray traced audio). What this system will be like, while Microsoft does not disclose.
As with the main competitor of the PlayStation 5, the Xbox 2 will use a special SSD storage structure. The manufacturer promises that the write and read speeds will be so high that the “hard drive” can be used as a “virtual RAM”. All this makes it possible to talk about an increase in the speed of the subsystem by 40 times, and overall performance by 4 times, compared to the current Xbox One X console.
In February 2020, Redmond quietly revealed the performance data of the Xbox Series X. Thus, the console is capable of delivering 12 TFLOPS, which is about eight times what the Xbox One computing system is capable of. In addition, Microsoft confirmed that the console is based on AMD APUs with Zen 2 processor cores and RDNA2 architecture GPUs. The console GPU uses 52 execution units. The frequency of the video accelerator is 1,825 GHz.
However, attentive analysts have already noted that the configuration, hardware and capabilities of the Xbox 2 will be very similar to the PlayStation 5, so software, optimization and game exclusives will come to the fore. For example, Halo Infinite is a game whose six-minute trailer was shown at E3. It should be noted that Microsoft promises full compatibility of the new console with current games.
Gamers were promised that multitasking support would be available in the new generation of the console, which allows you to “freeze” and then minimize several games at once and switch between titles almost instantly.
What’s really interesting is that Microsoft promises full support for Series X games from previous generations of Xbox. And not just the Xbox One and One X, but even the Xbox 360 and the 2001 Xbox.
As promised at the December presentation, the new Xbox Wireless Controller will be bundled with the Xbox Series X. It is an evolutionary development of the Xbox ONE joystick. The size and shape of the new generation has been redesigned to increase comfort for the gamer. The joystick also has an additional Share button, which is useful for recording screenshots and video gaming sessions. The device will work with the previous generation set-top box and computers running Windows 10.
The price of Xbox Series X in Our Country and the world
Currently, users can purchase an Xbox One X for between $450 and $480. It can be assumed that the cost of the next Xbox is likely to be around the same level or slightly higher. No pricing information was provided at E28 in June.
Microsoft is now offering a two-tier system for console buyers, with the S and X models being sold at the same time, depending on how high resolution the user wants and how much they’re willing to spend. It is possible that the Xbox X will also be sold in two versions at different prices.
In early September, we still heard about the official price of the console. At the start of sales, they will ask for $500 (37,7 thousand rubles at the exchange rate as of September 9, 2020). But in a number of countries, it will be possible to get a prefix under the Xbox All Access program, designed for 24 months. For a $35 monthly fee, not only the console is given, but an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription and Xbox Live service.