E3 2017: 6 Things We Learned About Xbox One X
The console's official name
Microsoft's upcoming console was previously codenamed Project Scorpio, and despite rumors that it might be called Xbox Scorpio or Xbox S, we learned from the company's E3 2017 press conference that the upcoming system has been officially named Xbox One X. What's slightly interesting about the name is that its acronym spells out XBOX.
While we already knew that it would feature an 8-core AMD SOC outfitted with an integrated GPU capable of delivering six teraflops of performance when we covered its tech specs, we also learned a bunch of new details about the system, which include its price, release date, design, and more.
Xbox One X price
As suggested from the rumored pricing leaks this morning, Microsoft confirmed that the Xbox One X will retail for $499. This puts it on par with the Xbox One's original retail price when it released in 2013. This also makes it cost roughly $100 more than the PS4 Pro's suggested retail price. It is worth mentioning that the Xbox One X will be noticeably more powerful than Sony's high-end console.
While $499 may be prohibitively expensive for some, it is inline with some predictions. Microsoft also offers the more affordable Xbox One S console geared for 1080p gaming. The cheaper system recently got a $50 price cut and retails for $250.
Xbox One X release date
The console is set to release worldwide on November 7, 2017. This puts it a year behind Sony's PlayStation 4 Pro, which released on November 10, 2016 for $399. While the PS4 Pro plays certain games at 4K, many of them are up-scaled using a rendering technique called checkerboard rendering. Microsoft asserts that the Xbox One X will be the "world's most powerful console" and can run games natively at true 4K.
Improvements to existing Xbox One games at 1080p
In addition to allowing you to play games at 4K, Microsoft asserted at its press conference that the Xbox One X would bolster existing Xbox One games in a number of ways that include adding anisotropic filtering, supporting AMD FreeSync, faster load times, and enabling supersampling; the latter of which renders games above 1080p and then downsizes them to an HDTV. This makes them look sharper than traditional 1080p.
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