Xbox Series X looks quite powerful - RTX 2080 like performance in Gears 5

A quick roundup of some of the Xbox Series X news tidbits that are floating around the web after Microsoft's reveal this week. First up, TechPowerUp highlights that the next-gen console has a semi-custom SoC from AMD with 320-bit memory bus and likely either 10GB or 20GB of memory.

As for the memory density, there's no way to tell. It could be 10 GB if those are 8 Gbit memory chips, or 20 GB if those are 16 Gbit. It boils down to which device the Xbox Series X the company wants to succeed. The Xbox One S features 8 GB of DDR3, while the spruced up Xbox One X features 12 GB of GDDR5. If the new Xbox Series X succeeds the latter, then it could very well feature 20 GB, more so given Microsoft's lofty design goals (4K UHD gaming with real-time ray-tracing).

VideoCardz focuses on the GPU side of the Xbox Series X. The new console has an SoC with a 3.66GHz eight-core sixteen-threaded CPU from AMD alongside a Big Navi 2X based integrated graphics solution with 52 CUs, good for 3328 shaders.

AMD’s custom System on the Chip has a die size of 360.45 mm2 which is almost identical to XBOX One X. The integrated RDNA 2 graphics will be clocked at 1.825 GHz, which suggests that the SoC features 3328 Stream Processors (3328 * 2* 1825 ~= 12.15 TFLOPs). The graphics will support DirectX Ray Tracing, HDMI 2.1, Variable Refresh Rate and Auto Low Latency Mode. The HDMI 2.1 support will certainly have a significant impact on the TV market and future desktop graphics as popularity for the standard grows.

TweakTown has some coverage about the storage side. Microsoft cooperated with Seagate to create a custom PCI Express 4.0 solid state disk as well as a new DirectX DirectStorage API that optimized asset management and compression.

The Xbox Series X uses a custom-made proprietary PCIe 4.0 SSD that's specifically designed to synergize with the rest of the system on a hardware and software level. The SSD itself is being made in partnership with Seagate and can deliver up to 4.8GB/sec compressed data transfer rates. That's 40x faster than the mechanical HDDs found in the Xbox One X. This translates to speedy load times like booting State of Decay 2 in 8 seconds versus the 30 seconds on the Xbox One X.

Next Windows Central points out that the console has 25 teraflops of ray-tracing performance. The performance in the tech demos seems similar to a PC with a GeForce RTX 2080 card. Interestingly, the game in question is Gears 5, an unoptimized port for the Xbox Series X was put together in just two weeks so even more performance should be possible:

However, even basic ports which barely use any of the Xbox Series X's new features are delivering impressive results. The Coalition's Mike Raynor and Colin Penty showed us a Xbox Series X conversion of Gears 5, produced in just two weeks. The developers worked with Epic Games in getting UE4 operating on Series X, then simply upped all of the internal quality presets to the equivalent of PC's ultra, adding improved contact shadows and UE4's brand-new... ray-traced screen-space global illumination. On top of that, Gears 5's cutscenes - running at 30 FPS on Xbox One X - were upped to a flawless 60 FPS. We'll be covering more on this soon, but there was one startling takeaway - we were shown benchmark results that, on this two-week-old, unoptimized port, already deliver very, very similar performance to an RTX 2080.