Good lord - huge info dump. Saw the videos pop up on YouTube, watched them both instantly. Absolutely loving Microsoft getting out ahead for this generation.
The bespoke storage solution has shown its first downside, though. I tend to agree with the above GAFers - I'm not a fan of proprietary storage mediums. With that said - and I need to stress this - I completely understand the need for it. With hard drives now being available to be used as part of the memory pool, minimums and standards need to be maintained. We're not just talking longer load screens with that level of integration.
D
dark10x
mentioned in the video that Microsoft did confirm that external storage was still supported. I'll be curious to see how that gets resolved. It's not great, but I get it - I just hope they don't pull a Sony and price gouge the living shit out of the customer to offset the cost of the console.
Apart from that though, I think they've exceeded my expectations, at least in terms of paper specs. The clocks - especially the GPU - are much higher than I was expecting. Completely explains the cooling-focused design. The quick resume stuff was pretty impressive, as was the BC upscaling, and the algorithmic HDR implementation on OG Xbox titles is straight up witchcraft. Timesplitters: Future Perfect at 4K with HDR? That's almost worth the ticket right there. Seeing that the RT hardware isn't a neutered version of the tech to accommodate a console, and then seeing it in action in their Minecraft demo that doesn't utilise normal rasterisation, is impressive as heck - even more so for a console. RT is gaining decent traction, so it's a forward thinking piece of kit that I'm very glad is in the box. The memory configuration is... odd, to say the least. We're not seeing too many games push legitimate uses into the area of 16gb - I've got 16gb of RAM in my gaming machine, for example, and I don't have plans to upgrade in the near future. Consoles typically get more mileage from their RAM, so perhaps 13.5gb of oddly configured RAM is enough for next-gen titles. I'll have to wait for actual developers to weigh in on that one though.
With the name, console design, and specs out in the wild, Microsoft have laid out their vision for the next-gen in a pretty convincing manner. They've built a beast of a machine that can - apparently - go toe to toe with current high end PCs. All we need to see now are the real next-gen games - and then the biggest question of all: price. With everything in the box, I'm convinced we're looking at $499.00.
Sony needs to start making some noise soon, or I'll be pre-ordering my Series X before I even know what a PS5 looks like.
