Going for speed: The load-busting, lag-limiting tech of the Xbox Series X
Explode! [credit: Microsoft ]
We've now had a day to process the massive amounts of Xbox Series X technical information that Microsoft and Digital Foundry unleashed on the world yesterday. Looking past the raw numbers, which you can see summarized in the chart below, it all starts to paint a picture of how the future of console gaming could look and feel different thanks to Microsoft's new hardware.
For sure, having enough raw power for a game's target of a full 4K resolution at 60fps by default (with 120fps capability) is a nice touch. Hardware-accelerated ray-tracing capabilities and high-resolution HDR upgrades for older backward-compatible titles will also lead to some distinct visual improvements as well. But the things that have us most excited about the Xbox Series X all have to do with speed.
High velocityThat starts with the "Xbox Velocity Architecture," which Microsoft promises will allow "100GB of game assets to be instantly accessible by the developer" as a sort of "extended memory." That "instant" access might be a slight exaggeration, since that expanded pool of data still seemingly has to come from the system's NVMe storage at a 2.4GB/s transfer rate. Even expanded to 4.8GB/s thanks to a new decompression stack, that's well below the 336 to 560GB/s access for data stored on the system's 16GB of RAM. It's also not clear why Microsoft specifically cites a 100GB limit for those "instant" assets amid the 1TB of internal storage built into the system.
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