Gadgetory

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 20 17s project Scorpio scarlet 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 it's 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 scarlet 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 in 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 an 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 them 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 scarlet the 1x is MSRP of four hundred ninety nine US dollars is already a little high for a console and Microsoft is hinted that scarlet 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 Scarlets incorporation of variable refresh rate technology which has been around for a while now on PCs in the form of G sync and free sync 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 discs 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 X cloud 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 consoles Hardware for some extra power and on the topic of power well project Scarlett 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 they're still about a year and a half to go before Scarlett hits the shelves I would 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 Scarlett 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 alright that's it for this episode of tech quickie thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our other videos if you want to comment below with video suggestions and don't forget to subscribe to tech Wiggy and follow tech quickie and and everyone else who's involved Dennis follow Dennis he's really nice sometimes