Power, speed and compatibility: Microsoft reveals full specs for the upcoming Xbox Series X

We always knew that the Xbox Series X was going to be an impressive, powerful device, and now Microsoft has confirmed this. The company has revealed the full specifications for the upcoming game console... and it's a beast!

The console is more like a high-end gaming PC (it's not without good reason that Microsoft bills it as its fastest, most powerful console ever) and it offers hardware-accelerated raytracing, 4K output at 60 fps, and support for up to 120fps. All of this is driven by an 8 core AMD Zen 2 CPU and an RDNA 2-class GPU -- and you'll be able to buy it this year.

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The confirmation of specs come via a blog post by Xbox Wire editor-in-chief Will Tuttle who verifies that the Xbox Series X will support four generations of games. He says that this next generation of Xbox is defined by three primary characteristics: power, speed and compatibility.

The custom RDNA 2 GPU kicks out 12 TFLOPs, which is double what the Xbox One X is capable of. In addition to a 1TB SSD, there's a 4K UHD Blu-Ray drive. Tuttle says: "The next major tenet of the Xbox Series X is speed, which can be defined in a large number of different ways. Modern devices have changed our expectations on how quickly you can move between experiences or applications. Most of us want to be able to instantly jump into an experience or return right to where we left off. This influenced the team designing the system architecture, as they wanted to ensure they enabled gamers to spend more time playing and less time waiting".

He goes on to say

A big part of that revolves around the addition of a solid-state drive (SSD). We have reached the upper limits of traditional rotational drive performance, so the team knew they needed to invest in SSD level I/O speeds to deliver the quality of experience they aspired to with Xbox Series X. This was an area where the team really wanted to innovate, and they knew this could be a game changer for the new generation. But they didn't want the I/O system to be just about your games loading faster.

Enter Xbox Velocity Architecture, which features tight integration between hardware and software and is a revolutionary new architecture optimized for streaming of in game assets. This will unlock new capabilities that have never been seen before in console development, allowing 100 GB of game assets to be instantly accessible by the developer. The components of the Xbox Velocity Architecture all combine to create an effective multiplier on physical memory that is, quite literally, a game changer.

So here are the specs in full:

At the moment we don't know exactly when the Xbox Series X will be released or how much it will cost, but Microsoft promises it will be available this holiday season