Microsoft’s Xbox One X is a high-end native 4K machine – but who is it intended for and what are the true benefits? We ask the execs who brought it to life

Several years ago, Xbox chief Phil Spencer, went to Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, and CFO, Amy Hood, with a somewhat unorthodox plan for the company’s latest console. It is not unheard of for a games machine to receive a hardware update at some point in the middle of its lifecycle – but Spencer didn’t want one new iteration. He wanted two.

The plan emerging from the R&D labs went like this. Xbox One S would add 4K video playback and HDR capabilities, but another more powerful machine, built with a refreshed processor, and using some of the high-end manufacturing technologies previously only found in advanced server systems, could fully support 4K resolutions. It was a risk and it was going to be expensive. “Our pitch had to be more than just kind of a refinement of what was there,” says Spencer. “The idea that we would come up with the most powerful console, with a higher resolution and a higher capability, as part of the Xbox One family. This was something new.”

Flash forward to the 2016 E3 conference, and Microsoft started its press event by revealing the Xbox One S, a sleek, streamlined white version of the standard console with a specs update and some neat features. It looked like this would be the hardware story of the year – but an hour later it wasn’t. Spencer ended the show with a teaser for something called Project Scorpio – a high-end, six-teraflop machine that would follow Xbox One S in the winter of 2017. Amid the standard whoops and cheers from the audience were a few shaking heads. Did Microsoft just announce two Xbox One updates in the same press conference? Why?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest At E3 2016, Microsoft teased Project Scorpio with a glimpse at its new custom CPU Photograph: Microsoft /youtube

A year later, the picture is a little clearer. Xbox One S is intended as the entry-level 4K machine, while Scorpio – now the Xbox One X – is the elite iteration. Both are there, in different ways, to capitalise on growing consumer interest in ultra HD screens. When asked about the sudden obsession with this emerging technology, Mike Ybarra, Xbox director of program management, puts it very simply. “Last year, 4K TVs were the number two holiday gift in the US.”

This is, it turns out, something Microsoft was already watching five years ago. “In 2012, we saw a trend of 4K content,” he says. “We saw the London Olympics being broadcast in 4K, we saw 4K displays coming out so we knew it was trending with networks and TV manufacturers. And so we said, ‘OK, we need to really usher true 4K into the living room. What’s that gonna take?’ We went out and talked to a lot of developers about what it means to deliver native 4K assets, and what kind of hardware that requires. At the same time, I was pushing our engineers. I said, ‘When you do it, I need it to be in a smaller case, and don’t take the power supply out, leave it in the console …’”

Xbox One X, then, contains a custom eight-core 2.3Ghz CPU, up from the 1.75Ghz chipset in the original Xbox One. It has a six-teraflop graphics processor running at 1172 Mhz, 12GB of memory, and 326Gbits-per-second memory bandwidth. It’s a considerable boost in power, but by utilising the new 16nm FinFET processor technology (the CPU is a third smaller than the original) and a compact liquid-cooled vapour system, the machine is actually smaller than the Xbox One S, which itself is 40% smaller than the original Xbox One. It is a sleek piece of engineering. Ybarra got his wish.

But while there was a drive to meet emerging consumer interest in 4K visuals and sleek consumer technology, Spencer maintains that the major motivation behind Xbox One X was coming from the game-makers.

“Developers were building games on Windows, and seeing the capabilities at 4K and at a higher spec,” he says. “Obviously, because we’re Microsoft, we could see the PC roadmap, and we said, ‘There’s an interesting opportunity for us to build a console that may not have the same capabilities as your highest-end PC, but allows developers to take the games that they’re targeting with a native 4K frame buffer on PC and bring them to console.’ For Microsoft, that is important, because now you start to see PC and console, at least from a development standpoint, sharing some technology and specs. The developer feedback we were getting was important there.”

According to Ybarra, Microsoft has also sought to make it as easy as possible for multi-platform developers to port their PC code over the Xbox One X – in this way, the machine has a chance of getting stellar support. “Most games today have a high-end PC version that the developer already creates,” he says. “So when we started creating this console back in 2012 we said, ‘How do we leverage the work they’re doing and make it super simple to bring that into the living room?’. One of the most important things for us was to make the developer process as easy as possible. So we took toolsets on console and PC and we unified them so that developers can use them across both those platforms.”

Feedback from developers during E3 was positive. Paul Bettner of Playful, the developer behind Super Lucky’s Tale told GameSpot, “[Xbox One X] is the most developer-friendly console we have ever worked with [...] The tools and support we had developing the game is the most advanced it’s ever been.” Jesse Rapczak of Studio Wildcard said of Ark: Survival Evolved, “It’s amazing. It’s basically like Epic settings on PC.”

From the early demos shown at E3, certainly in-house developers are doing astonishing things with the technology. Running at 60fps in native 4K resolution, Forza Motorsports 7 is the current killer app (at E3 a spokesperson claims that when the ForzaTech engine was moved to Xbox One X they found they had 30% GPU surplus, even after increasing resolution to 4K, HDR at 60fps). The detail on the car models is scintillating, with exhaust pipes and windshield wipers that rattle at speed, with dynamic clouds casting moving shadows over the track and with environmental textures built using a technique known as photogrammetry, utilising 4K reference photos to create unnervingly authentic landscapes.



Gears of War 4 also, looks astonishing; we saw a demo of the final act of the game, with the human troops in giant mechs raiding the Locust base. The detailing on the metallic hulks is so fine, you can see scratches and rust patches. Even Minecraft is visually stunning, the forthcoming Super Duper Graphics pack adding specular and dynamic lighting so the sun casts shadows across the landscape as it moves through the sky, and new water effects enhance reflections. Draw distance has also been pushed out, so landscapes roll on for miles.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Forza Motorsport 7 Photograph: Microsoft

Evidently, 4K is the heir to what some thought stereoscopic 3D displays would bring to gaming. In an increasingly competitive entertainment sector, with tablets, phones, subscription TV services and social media channels competing for attention, games are having to find new ways to capture and hold viewer head space. “I always say to my game teams, ‘Look, if you provide Dolby Atmos spatial audio, high-dynamic range, 8-million pixels on the screen, people will lose track of time because they’ll be having so much fun,’” says Ybarra. “That immersion is really what we’re after. When we created this box it was really about immersion more than anything else we wanted to do. I mean, you played Forza Horizon 3 on Windows at 4K, and we saw those images, and those things are breathtaking. When we set out, we started talking about these effects and how they impacted us. That’s immersion; it is part of the magic of the entertainment industry that we’re in.”

Spencer agrees, adding that he sees 4K as something that’s not just grandstanding visual enhancement, but subtle naturalistic addition. “I was on the EA stage talking to Patrick Söderlund about Madden, and one of the things he commented on was how the grass looks, and how it moves. He said if you had somebody circle 10 things on the screen that are different about running on Xbox One X, nobody would ever pick up on that, but subconsciously, as visuals get more lifelike your brain notices when stuff like that isn’t quite right. 4K can be just about the physics, maybe even just the way the trees move.”

But Xbox One X is also about something else – it’s a recognition that a new demographic of gamer is emerging. These customers play maybe one or two titles over many months, purchasing mission packs, season passes and other DLC as they go – games like Destiny, The Division, Minecraft, Fifa – games designed as services rather than products, and structured to last for years rather than weeks. According to Spencer, this new consumer sector wants the very best equipment on which to experience these games; like golfing enthusiasts paying out for the most expensive clubs, or music buffs spending a fortune on a turntable. The Xbox One X is partially aimed at these single-minded hobbyists – hence a large segment of the E3 showcase focusing on the next-generation of service games, such as Ark and PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Games like Destiny 2 are appealing to a new demographic of player who specialise in one or two long-running titles. Xbox One X is an attempt to provide those players with the optimum experience of those games Photograph: Activision

“We have a group of gamers that’s growing larger and larger, who want the very best, and they’re investing their time and money in franchises over a long run,” he says. “When you give them a console that lets them have that premium experience, and the games they’re already playing are going to be able to get better, and that was an important part of it, we said, ‘OK, like, this is an opportunity we should go after.”

The big question is, will anyone else be convinced? In the aftermath of this year’s E3 presentation there has been some controversy over the Xbox One X and its performance capabilities. During the event, games site Digital Foundry discovered that Assassin’s Creed Origins, although visually enhanced for the new machine, would not be running in native 4K resolution. It would instead use the technique known as checkerboarding to upscale its graphics – just like the supposedly less powerful PS4 Pro. Similarly, Origins would be locked to 30 frames-per-second, as would Destiny 2, Crackdown 3 and – in the campaign mode – Gears of War 4. The quote from PS4 system designer Mark Cerny, that it would take an 8 teraflop GPU to truly render native 4K imagery, started to do the rounds on gaming forums.

When confronted with this, Albert Penello, director of product management and planning at Xbox, is bullish in his response. “We’re going to deliver true 4K games in the living room,” he says. “We already had [4K] game engines to tell us what to build. We were able to profile real code, both stuff that was running in the wild and working with our development teams like Turn10 – the spec was a result of the games. In the year since we’ve announced, people have said, ‘oh they can’t deliver 4K in that box, it doesn’t have enough power’, and the whole time we’re like, ‘no we can do it, the specs were built around existing game code!’”

So what about all these games running at 30fps? “We made a clear, conscious decision to say, if you have a 900p or 1080p engine running on Xbox One, you’re going to be able to that in 4K on Xbox One X,” he says. “That was the design goal. It’s really up to the developer. I’m sure developers will chose to do something else and that’s great – they may run at 30fps, because they want more artistry, they may use checkerboarding because they want more visual effects. But we designed it to do 4K, we know it can be done.”

This is the tricky route ahead for the Xbox One X. On one hand, Microsoft has to market it as this elite piece of consumer technology, loaded with impressive specs and stats and arcane technical terms, but – as with the best audio equipment – the effects may be more subtle. Phil Spencer highlights the short E3 trailer for Life is Strange: Before the Storm, as an example: “It’s not trying to be photorealistic, but they build a mood around the character, and you kind of … you anchor on her. In the end, when you put this power in the hands of the best developers, the way they’re gonna use those techniques will be as much about the subtlety as it is about the thing that hits you upside the head like a spectacular sunset. It will be really meaningful.”

Several years ago, Spencer pitched the idea of two Xbox One updates to the Microsoft execs – and they went for it. The business model may seem strange to veteran industry watchers, but – at scale – it makes more sense. “Satya understands,” says Spencer. “There’s a billion gamers on the planet, the gaming business worldwide is over 100 billion dollars, it’s massive business – and it’s growing.”



The trick will be appeasing those very directed high-end consumers, while encouraging other consumers that 4K has more to offer than just eight million pixels and some nice lighting effects. In the end, are Xbox One X and PS4 Pro about technology or artistry? Will games just look better or will they feel better? No specs sheet, benchmark test or market analysis can really tell us that.