- Hey guys, this is Austin
and welcome to the ultimate Xbox comparison.
- When I started here back in 2000,
the most recent console that we were all playing
was Dreamcast, we got it on 9/9/99.
In many ways, that was there's a lot of special spiritual
connections between the Dreamcast and original Xbox.
You know, it ran actually Windows CE as an operating system.
We had partnered with a lot of the folks at Sega
to bring a lot of that content also to Xbox
and we were learning a lot from them.
- [Distorted Voice] Its thinking.
- The Sega Dreamcast was the first time
that a version of Windows was found on a home console.
The inclusion of Windows CE meant that developers
had options for much more advanced
development tools from the PC such as DirectX.
The problem here was the Sega
had their own custom development tool
which in a lot of ways actually made it much simpler
for developers to take advantage of the limited resources
that were available on the Dreamcast.
The titles that did take advantage
of Windows CE were pretty cool though.
We're talking Tomb Raider,
the original Rainbow Six as well as Resident Evil II.
The Dreamcast didn't exactly set the world on fire,
however, it did plant the seed of an idea over Microsoft
to start their own console business.
Despite having high profile PC exclusives
such as Age of Empires as well
as Microsoft Flight Simulator,
Bill Gates was nervous about the upcoming success
or potential success rather of the Sony PlayStation 2.
(upbeat music)
When Seamus Blackley, a graphics programmer at Microsoft
approached gates about an idea for their own console,
it was very quickly greenlit.
Blackley led a small group of people at Microsoft in 1998
to start working on the Midway Project,
which fun fact was named after the Battle of Midway
with US decisively beat the Japanese, aka console wars.
- Well, there was a small group of folks
that have this like big idea that had worked
on DirectX technology on the PC side
and said, hey, what if we took this technology
and Microsoft had made a bunch of PC games,
so we took that technology and we built it
into a plug and play kind of appliance
like console for the living room.
And we felt like we had the tech,
we have the operating system capabilities,
we had the online networking capabilities,
we actually had game studio,
so we had a lot of the internal gradients to make it happen.
- Other PC tech including using an internal hard drive,
something that hadn't been done on consoles yet,
as well as taking advantage of an internet connection
which would work right out of the box.
In the end, Microsoft opted to load
the Xbox up with a custom version
of Windows 2000 for the operating system
as well as running DirectX for the actual games themselves.
Now the DirectX portion of this
actually is a pretty important point.
So not only did this have a ton of different names
when it was being developed,
but the most common one was the DirectX Box,
which of course was shortened to Xbox, a much cleaner name.
The Xbox was officially announced at GDC in March of 2000,
coincidentally about the same time
that the Sony PlayStation II went on sale in Japan.
With that console quickly looking to become a juggernaut,
there was a huge uphill battle for the Xbox to go.
I mean it's sure of course you know
it's Microsoft and it is huge company,
but its easy to forget not only just how difficult
and expensive it is to create a console,
but of course, how expensive it is to spend
all this marketing dollars and all this stuff
to get people on board to actually buy your brand new Xbox.
To combat this, Microsoft aggressively marketed
the Xbox in the run up to E3 of 2000.
Now at the show there they met a developer
which would end up completely
changing the future of the Xbox, it was Bungie.
And very quickly they purchased the studio for $30 million
and the Xbox had its killer app.
Now Bungie had been working on Halo since 1997
and it had a very, very long lifespan
to get to the point where it actually launched on the Xbox.
First of all it started out as a real time strategy game,
which then morphed into a third person shooter
and finally landed as a first person shooter,
which of course really kind of revolutionized the genre.
Now of course today Halo is synonymous with Xbox
but back in 1999, it was good old Steve Jobs at Macworld
who was showing off the brand new Bungie title Halo.
- This game is gonna ship early next year for Bungie
and this is the first time anybody has ever seen it,
its the first time they debut it,
and so I'm very happy to welcome on stage
Jason Jones, who is the co founder of Bungie
and the Halo Project lead, Halo's the name of the game,
and we're gonna see for the first time Halo.
- Halo was originally going to be a Mac title,
and in fact, it did actually ship on the Mac
but even though this version was a little bit rough,
you can still see a lot of similarities between this
and the final version was shipped on Xbox.
Bill Gates revealed the final Xbox design at CES in 2001
and he didn't do it alone,
he had a little bit of help from The Rock.
And no, not like The Rock as we know him today,
I'm talking The Rock in full character,
because 2001 was a really weird time.
- Good morning, and Bill Gates,
you have some pretty cool catch phrases as well.
What are some of your favorite?
- My favorite is probably writing
hardcore C to create slick type code.
(audience laughing)
- The Xbox officially went on sale
at midnight on November 15 2001 here in the United States
and it followed up in early 2002 in other parts of the world
such as Europe as well as Asia.
And it didn't exactly will catch on
anywhere else around the world.
By the end of its lifecycle,
the Xbox had only sold a mere 450,000 units in Japan
and only about 2 million in the entire Asia Pacific region.
That was a massive failure,
although it did perform a little bit better in Europe
where they sold a grand total of around 6 million Xboxes.
Halo really is the reason that they sold the Xbox at all.
In the first few months of being on sale,
they sold over 1 million copies of Halo,
which is a lot especially by 2001 standards.
- You know, the team had a big vision
and had a lot of crazy ideas,
and it was just fun to like kind of figure out
how do we pull that all off and then content.
I remember when we first showed Halo
for the first time at E3, original Halo Combat Evolved,
people were kind of like, I'm not sure,
I mean, first person shooters
really hadn't existed with a controller
and mapping the keyboard and mouse controllers
to a controller was a new thing,
people took a little while to get used to it,
but then as soon as we launched,
it was clear that we had something special
and but not only did Halo take off
but then we launched Xbox Live the next holiday,
it really took off from there.
(intense music)
- Less than a year after release,
Microsoft did give the Xbox a price cut
going from $300 down to 200.
Now this meant that they could
better compete with the GameCube
as well as hopefully with the PlayStation 2
but it did mean that Microsoft
was selling the console at loss,
and at the end of the day, no console of this generation
could even come close to the kind of sales numbers
of the PlayStation 2 set down.
Inside, the Xbox was very clearly
the most powerful console of this generation
and that is almost entirely due to the fact
that they did opt to go for a very PC like architecture.
This uses a custom Intel Pentium III
CPU clocked at 733 megahertz, 64 megabytes of DDR SRAM
as well as a very customized Nvidia GPU.
Now this meant this had some real performance
especially in games such as Project Gotham Racing,
as well as Halo 2, which performed well and looked great,
however, it meant the backwards compatibility
for future generations was a little bit more difficult
but we'll get into that just a little bit later.
Now the Xbox did use a DVD drive
unlike the GameCube and Dreamcast,
however, unlike the PlayStation 2,
you had to purchase a dongle as well as a remote
to actually play any kind of DVD content.
Just put a DVD in standardly,
it just doesn't really do anything.
So that was pretty big negative point
in that you had to go buy extra stuff
whereas lots of people bought PS2s purely as DVD players.
This also opened up a world of homebrew
and piracy issues for the Xbox.
Now Microsoft did redesign the internal components
of the Xbox a couple times to try
to get around people who are cracking it,
but generally speaking, this even to this day
is still a very popular emulation machine
and there are even like flash drives that you can buy
that will allow you to completely open it up for homebrew
or whatever you wanna do on it.
One of the more unique and controversial
parts of the original Xbox
was the controller it shipped with, the Duke.
Now this thing was absolutely massive.
And while some people do swear by it even to this day,
for the most part, it was a pretty major failure,
especially considering that they actually developed
a secondary controller called the S for the Japanese market
which they subsequently used to ship
everywhere in the world by 2002.
So the Duke was cool, but it didn't exactly last long
and also, have you seen how big this thing is?
One slight advantage of the Xbox controller
is that it did introduce the idea of a breakaway cable.
Let's say your annoying roommate
decides to kick your Xbox or kick your cable,
it would just attach as opposed
to ripping your entire console down,
which is almost as good as wireless.
- Even in the color materials design of the hardware,
the cables themselves had sort of
a translucent, green effect,
it really tried to reflect
the quality of the user experience,
so, as you remember, when you turned on the original Xbox
you had this sort of rotating sphere
that felt out of this world
and so we really wanted the hardware
to start to bridge that experience.
- The real linchpin for the Xbox's success with Xbox Live
which launched in November of 2002,
a full year after the console came out.
Now it was always designed with online play in mind,
I mean, of course, it has ethernet jack on the back.
However, Xbox Live is really what separated this
from the rest of the consoles of that generation.
It's easy to take this kind of stuff for granted
but there's a lot of legitimate innovations
that came with Xbox Live on the original Xbox.
That ethernet jack, provided that you had broadband internet
allowed you to not only play games with other people,
but you can even download content
to your hard drive for games or you can chat via voice
which we you actually had the headset.
None of this stuff was really even remotely around
for some of those very, very early
console gaming experiences,
I mean it was all kludgy and weird,
kinda like the Nintendo switches today.
This was a big hit almost immediately,
there were over 150,000 people
who subscribed in the first week
and over 50 games are available
for Xbox Live by the end of 2003.
Now the easiest way to tell would be to take a look
at the boxes which show live online enabled
and of course, Halo 2 is really
one of the biggest sellers of the entire Xbox system.
By 2003, Microsoft was well underway
working on the sequel to the Xbox, the 360
but they still had one final game to released
and of course, that was Halo 2
which came out In November of 2004.
And this was an absolutely massive seller
with over 8.5 million copies sold.
Despite its cliffhanger ending,
Halo 2 is widely regarded as one
of the best games in the Halo franchise,
and one of the most influential
multiplayer games of all time.
Just to give you a good idea of how popular this game was,
Halo two was still the most popular game
on Xbox Live all the way up into 2006
when it's finally dethroned by Gears of War.
Yeah, not a bad run.
It's impressive that right out of the gate,
Microsoft were able to compete with the giants of the space
such as Sega and Nintendo and Sony,
but that was certainly not enough
because their next fore was a, let's say,
just a little bit more successful.
Since the beginning of 2003,
Microsoft were hard to work on the next generation,
of course, being the 360.
Now in large part, this was really kicked off
when they had a huge meeting
at their campus in Bellevue, Washington
where over 400 game developers attended.
Why they should pick up support for the brand new Xbox.
By August of 2003, Microsoft had made the decision
to go with ATI to provide the graphics
on the Xbox 360 as opposed to Nvidia,
who of course did provide the GPU inside the original Xbox.
Now this is largely emblematic of the differences
between the original Xbox program and the 360.
The original Xbox was largely just made up of components
that were pretty much right off the shelf from the PC space.
Now that enabled Microsoft to get a console
out into the world fairly quickly,
but the downside was that it was very expensive to produce
and they really couldn't customize things
and shrink things over the generations
to kind of make it cheaper and cheaper.
Whereas with the Xbox 360,
this was designed to be fully custom from the ground up
and that made a huge difference.
- It is midnight eastern time,
do you know where your Xbox 360 is?
Well, it's actually probably right over there.
Yes, the moment we've been waiting for is here.
Adam is down at Best Buy in the Mojave Desert
to witness the sale of the first Xbox 360, Adam.
- All right, well, the excitement level
just kicked up a couple of notches.
We're right here at an impromptu Best Buy shop
and all of the new Xbox 360s are being unloaded.
- When the 360 launched in the US on November 22 2005,
it was an immediate smash hit.
So much so in fact that a lot of people
assumed that Microsoft were artificially
holding back the production to make the line seem longer,
when he they were just building
these things as fast as they could.
And by the end of 2005, a mere month and change later,
they had sold over 1.5 million of the consoles.
- I would say I am probably most proud of the Xbox 360.
I just think like the launch lineup,
I think the leap from where we went was so massive.
We were the first box connected to the TV
that streamed Netflix, a lot of people don't remember that.
But I remember actually working with Netflix in early days
where they were a mail order DVD business
and they were looking for digital distribution
and we were like, hey, what if we put Netflix on our Xbox
and allow people to stream movies?
And just the games I mean, we talked about project offerings
Call of Duty, KOTOR, Mass Effect,
of course the Gears franchise, the Halo franchise,
Forza in many ways got born in that generation.
So yeah, I would say that was probably the most special.
- The 2005 launch date is important
because it was a full year before the Wii
as well as the PlayStation 3 is launched.
Now it's easy to think about it today as like,
oh, the Xbox was a little bit better,
but in reality, this was the beginning of the HD era.
(intense music)
Now in 2005, yeah, there are a few flat screen TVs
and HD was just starting to become a thing,
but the 360 really was what popularized it
in a lot of people's homes.
Especially considering that you can get
this kind of performance a full year before the PlayStation,
well, it didn't get off to a great start for the Sony camp.
The gap and release dates meant that Microsoft
had a full year to really make sure that 360
was fully established with essentially no competition.
Now yeah, sure, there were a few games
that came out for the PS3 launch like Resistance,
but, by that point the 360 had a ton of great titles
like Call of Duty 2, Gears as well as Fear.
Look, there's no doubt that Microsoft
beating Sony to the punch paid off in a big way,
however, they also had a slightly uncomfortable oversight,
the Xbox 360 red ring of death.
- The red rings of doom signal that your Xbox 360 is fried.
Microsoft hasn't specified the cause
but users say the console's cooling system
just can't take the heat of a lot of play.
- So when the hardware would fail,
the power button would light up with three red lights
which would you indicate that you have a major, major issue.
I'm sure Jimmy will do a great job
of showing off what that looks like right now.
Now this wasn't necessarily for everyone,
so not all Xbox has died, but generally speaking
most of the launch 360s did not last very long.
Now I will give Microsoft some credit,
they did institute a three year warranty
and in large part if you had a red ring to Xbox 360,
you could just ship it back and they would swap it out.
But the problem was that the 360,
I don't wanna say was rushed,
but there were certainly a lot of major issues
with the reliability on that first model.
Now, there are a few different reasons why,
some people have speculated that it was to do
with thermal paste or maybe the solder
that would kind of start to melt after a while,
but regardless, that first 360, it didn't last very long.
People came up with all kinds of
ridiculous remedies to fix this.
I know the towel trick was big for a while
and that you would turn on your 360,
wrap a towel around it and I guess the solder or something
would reflow and it would work for a little bit.
A lot of times the towel trick
would only get your 360 to work for like 20 minutes,
like it was just not a good solution.
Even with this technical issues,
the Xbox 360 launch actually really strongly,
and a large part was because it had a good design.
- The modularity thing was really out of necessity
to have an affordable product
that more people could get from day one.
So upgrading hard drives, adding wireless,
attaching more controllers, et cetera,
all of ways that we can give people choice
and really get these game consoles
and experiences to more people.
- So the Xbox 360 came out, there are two models,
the premium which costs $400
and came with a massive 20 gigabyte hard drive
as well as a wireless controller,
and then there was the core model.
Now this was only $300 which made it a really good deal,
and while you didn't have a wireless controller
and you didn't have a hard drive,
you had to deal with memory cards,
but this got a lot of people into the door
because again, this was the very first HD console,
it was really exciting.
And sure lots of people bought a 360
before realizing they had to buy a hard drive
or a bunch of memory cards but that was fine.
Nearly five years after the original 360 came out,
in 2010, we got this, the Xbox 360 Slim.
Now not only is it significantly smaller,
but it had some very key upgrades like Wi-Fi built in.
Inside, this was a very simplified
version of the original 360
so not only was everything shrunk down,
but they had a little bit more
of a clever design with the motherboard
to add the CPU and the GPU together on one chip.
And generally speaking this
was not only cheaper to manufacture
but in large part it was better
across the board compared to the launch 360.
The Slim also came in a wide range different configurations,
special editions with different hard drives.
And this was the very first Xbox 360
that made it down to a mere $200 price point
with the four gigabyte internal drive.
Really, the Slim actually did a very good job
of distilling everything that was great about the 360
and putting it into a smaller,
cheaper, more reliable package.
And then Microsoft decided to create another one.
In June of 2013, we got this the Xbox 360 E.
Now this was announced at the same E3
as the original Xbox One.
And while the brand new console was super exciting,
the E just wasn't.
So it's not really that much smaller than the slim Xbox 360,
it doesn't really have any additional features,
in fact, has like fewer USB ports.
And while I guess the design is a little bit
more reminiscent of the Xbox One, I dunno,
there just really wasn't a lot going for this guy.
Now in large part, the reason why this was so successful
was that Microsoft had a huge
head start going into the generation.
The original Xbox really pioneered online gaming
in any kind of real cohesive way
and all that came straight over to the 360.
So not only could you move your account over
but things like Party Chat really solved multiplayer lobbies
the ability to watch Netflix with your friends,
there was a lot of stuff that Xbox Live
did right immediately out of the gate,
whereas on the PS3 side,
well, I mean PSN existed, and it was free.
Another big element to the Xbox 360
success was Xbox Live Arcade.
Now this doesn't sound impressive today.
It was an online store where you could purchase
and download fairly cheap indie games,
but this is a big deal.
Back then there really weren't a lot of indie titles
that you could buy for a console.
Now there were a lot of restrictions on these games,
they had to have only 200 achievement points,
they had to have a demo,
they only ran at 720p which to be fair
was actually pretty good for the 360.
But the bigger issue, especially with the launch version,
was that the games had to be 50 megabytes or less,
like smaller than a game that runs on your phone,
mostly because it needs to run
on a memory card of 64 megabytes.
Thankfully, that restriction was loosened after a while
and tons of great games flourished because of it.
The interface of the Xbox 360,
well, it never was quite as clean
as what you got on the PlayStation 3
so there were a few major revisions.
First of all it launched with the blades.
So this wasn't a terrible UI,
you could go between a few different blades
to pick your games or videos or whatever,
but when it really came into its own,
is what the New Xbox Experience
where you had a revolutionary new interface with avatars.
You could install games to the drive,
but really my personal sweet spot
was back when they finally brought out
the new Metro UI to the Xbox 360.
Yes, I'm sure you remember the wonderful interface,
the classic that was known from Windows 8 and the Zune HD.
Well, yep, that came to the 360.
And, it was slow.
The Xbox 360 controller has easily gone down
as one of the best of all time.
Now when you look at it,
it's actually not that big of an upgrade
over what you've got with the Xbox S controller,
however it got rid of the stupid black
and white buttons in favor of actual bumpers,
and realistically,
this is still the standard for not only the Xbox,
but it was the standard for the PC for over a decade.
Now at this point, yes, the Xbox One I personally do prefer,
but this was way, way ahead of the DualShock 3
as far as I'm concerned.
Just like the original Xbox,
the 360, well, it had some bumps along the way
was an incredibly successful console.
And I think a lot of people look back at this
and think about this really as the sort of sweet spot,
the golden age of Xbox, if you will.
Now, to be fair, this console generation
was really good to pretty much everyone in this space.
I mean, Nintendo sold like 100 billion Wiis,
the PS3 even though it came off to a very slow start
ended up actually barely surpassing the 360 at the end,
but as far as I'm concerned,
the Xbox 360 was the real winner of this generation.
Not only did it have a bunch of amazing games
like Halo 3 and Gears of War as well as Alan Wake,
but what it really did was set the stage for gaming
as we know it with huge things such as Xbox Live.
However, a few short years later,
storm clouds hit the horizon
as it was time for the Xbox One.
The Xbox One was unveiled at E3 of 2013
and it had a rough go from the start.
So first of all, it cost a full $100 more than the PS4
and that was only the first in a series
of very questionable decisions,
which really made the Xbox One
look bad right out of the gate.
I remember I was actually there at E3
when they announced this,
and man, the crowd's reaction was not too pretty.
- Now, have you ever wanted to do
more than one thing at a time when you're watching TV?
Of course you have.
- $500, Kinect, DRM, it looks like a VCR.
Actually, that last part was what people said.
Now there were a lot of issues
with the way that they announced the Xbox One,
but the biggest and by far the most damaging was the DRM.
All right, so time to gather around and pay attention
because the original policy
was well, confusing to say the least.
So to start out with, if you purchased a game,
whether it was on disk or digital,
as soon as you put it in your Xbox,
it would then be permanently tied to your gamertag.
So goodbye selling that used copy of Modern Warfare 17
on GameStop because not gonna happen.
Oh, and did I mentioned that your console
had to be connected every 24 hours to the internet
otherwise it wouldn't work?
Yeah, that was popular, everyone really loved that.
I know Sony had a very clear video
on how you can share games on the PS4.
- Thanks.
- And then there was the Xbox One version of Kinect.
Now this guy came with all the launch Xbox Ones,
and was a huge reason why it
was a full $100 more expensive than the PS4.
On top of that,
at least it based on the initial announcement,
this is going to be mandatory for the Xbox,
if you didn't have it plugged in, it just wouldn't function
and a lot of the UI was built around Kinect.
Now it wasn't all bad,
there were certainly advantages to Kinect
and honestly even after it was sort of phased out,
there were a lot of use for it
in the PC space because it was a great tracker,
but for games, not so helpful
unless you're, I dunno, into Just Dance or something.
The reaction as you might imagine
was overwhelmingly negative and Sony did everything
they could to really play up all of the strength of the PS4
which at the time were many, many, many, many, many.
To give Microsoft some credit,
they did reverse a lot of these decisions
before the Xbox One actually went on sale.
The DRM was the first to go.
So the Xbox One does still install games to the hard drive
but all you do to make them work is just insert the disk.
You take it out and you can give it someone else,
sell it, whatever the case is.
On top of that, they did get rid
of the requirement to use Kinect
even though it was still bundled
with the Xbox for a little while.
But all this being said, the damage was absolutely done
and Microsoft's roughest console generation was just beginning.
The original Xbox One launched on November 22 2013
with exactly one option, black.
Well, you know what, I'll be completely honest,
I actually think that this is a still
pretty decent looking console.
Spec wise, the Xbox One shares an almost
identical architecture with the PlayStation 4.
So they're both AMD-based,
they both have a 500 gig hard drive
and they both have the same eight core
AMD Jaguar CPU inside.
Although to give the Xbox a little bit of credit,
it is very slightly higher clocked versus the PS4.
That however is pretty much the end of the good stuff
and where the, let's call them compromises begin.
The big problem came down to graphics.
Sony pretty early on committed to using GDDR5 memory
which was standard for graphics cards at the time
and delivered a ton of bandwidth
at the cost of lots of money
which is never good when you're trying to build a console.
With most rumors paying the PS4
at having only four gigs of RAM,
Microsoft opted to go for that
slower but cheaper DDR3 memory
and offered the Xbox One with a full
eight gigabytes of stuff.
This meant that the performance of the Xbox One
was inferior to the PS4 in almost every way.
Not only did it have slower memory
but they had also dedicated a large portion of their APU
to that ESRAM buffer to actually speed up the DDR3,
which meant that not only did this have slower memory
but it also was more difficult to develop for
because it had that ESRAM buffer
that devs had to keep in mind,
and to top it all off, because they put that in there,
they didn't have enough room for a big GPU like the PS4 did.
So it was slow memory, hard to work on
and it was less powerful overall.
This haunts the base Xbox to this day.
So where the PlayStation 4 was able to run games
at a full 1080p in most cases,
this guy would usually run games at 720p or 900p.
And in cases where they were visually the same,
a lot of times PS4 games just ran smoother.
And all this put together meant that it was very, very clear
that the PS4 was the more powerful console
and the Xbox didn't have really
any technical advantage which was meaningful.
Fast forward to August of 2016 and we got the Xbox One S.
As the slim version of the original console,
this was better in every single way.
Not only was it way smaller and it even included
an internal power supply versus the giant brick of the One,
but on top of that it supports a full 4K out as well as HDR.
And then we have the weirdest
inclusion in the Xbox One line,
the Xbox One S All Digital Edition or Xbox SAD for short.
So this is literally identical to the One S,
except that they removed that Ultra HD bluray player
and knocked $50 off the price.
Although the One S for the most part
was actually available on sale for less than the SAD guy,
but it plays digital games.
The biggest advancement for the Xbox One,
however, it came with the Xbox One X.
Now this was teased at E3 at 2016 as Project Scorpio
and went on sale in November of 2017.
- Well, I think for us, you know,
it kind of brought us back to like our original roots,
and we built the original Xbox,
it was the most powerful console at the time, you know?
And sometimes it's like,
do you wanna be the best selling product
or do you actually wanna be the best product?
And we defined ourselves as we knew
the competition already had a head start,
we actually wanna make the best console.
And I think that's what we deliberately did with the Xbox.
I think if you look at the Xbox One X,
you know, the leadership we have there
being the most powerful console kind of brought us back
to what that root and reason and foundation was,
and that is our passion going forward.
We wanna continue to innovate and deliver
and bring the most powerful, most capable hardware
in the console space to our fans.
- Priced at $500, to One X is a lot
more expensive than the One S,
although it's not actually very slightly smaller,
and importantly, it delivers a lot more power
and have to play a lot of games at a true 4K resolution.
The CPU was slightly overclocked in the One X
but the big difference came down to graphics.
Gone is the old DDR3 memory and the ESRAM buffer,
and in is a full 12 gigabytes of GDPR5 memory
as well as a much, much bigger GPU,
which really does enable 4K gaming.
Now sure, the PS4 and the PS4 Pro
were way better than the One
but the One X definitely took the crown back
as this generation's most powerful console.
- We're always thinking of the whole thing as the system.
The controller is the thing that you hold,
and you interact with the controller
a lot more than the console itself
cause that's kinda on your shelf or under your TV,
and so we pay a ton of focus to the design of the controller
and making sure that we're always advancing
that ergonomically, functionally.
- We try not to take away like features or things
that people loved about the older controllers.
One thing you'll notice is that the thumbsticks
are still asymmetrical as they have been over time,
and that's something our fans have told us that they love,
and that's something that we consider like a cool part
of our design and we wouldn't change that.
- One place that the Xbox One has lagged behind
the competition its entire lifespan is in exclusive games.
Stuff like Forza says great year after year,
Gears 4 was a good if a little bit unconventional reboot,
however, games such as Halo 5
had decent multiplayer but on top of that,
we had games like Quantum Break which really fell flat.
And while the first Titanfall
was a great exclusive on the Xbox One,
the follow up went multi platform
and didn't really perform all that well.
Now, sure there are a lot of decent indie titles,
but for the most part, there really has not been
one killer app this generation
on why you should actually buy an Xbox One over PS4.
Now there are some options
such as the Halo Master Chief Collection,
but nowadays it's a collection of old games,
but they've been broken for years,
like literally, it took them like three or four years
to finally get a lot of these multiplayer bugs figured out.
So a few years ago, Microsoft included some Xbox 360
backwards compatibility on the One.
Now this is not for all games, although this point
is the vast majority of major 360 titles,
and the best part is they just work.
So if you have the disk, you put into the Xbox,
and it does have to re-download the game
which has been recompiled for the One,
but you have to pay anything.
Microsoft has also brought out a selection
of original Xbox games which are playable on the One.
Now this is especially impressive considering
that the original Xbox is incredibly hard to emulate
thanks to that very unusual Nvidia GPU,
I mean its the reason why we really
still have never had a proper Xbox emulator.
Now, all that is pure of the fact
that if you're playing on an Xbox One X,
you can actually get some major improvements
to performance as well as resolution.
So a lot of games will run in a nine times higher resolution
which for a lot of, especially 360 games
can actually scale them to pretty much a full 4K.
All of this brings us to the latest addition
to the ecosystem, Xbox Game Pass.
So this is a Netflix style
subscription service which came out in 2017
and it has been majorly overhauled since then.
Look, the Xbox One launch was a complete and total failure
and it robbed Microsoft of a lot of momentum
that they had coming from the Xbox 360.
When you look at this generation,
it is clear that the PlayStation 4 has won
and there's a lot of momentum in the Nintendo camp
with the Switch toward the end.
However, all that being said,
with Microsoft being the underdogs,
it's meant that they've tried really hard
to make the Xbox One better,
and if you look at this console today
versus what came out back in 2013,
there's a massive difference.
Today we sit at a very interesting time for Xbox.
On one hand, lots of people have fond memories of the 360
but on the other, as far as they've come with the Xbox One,
it certainly has not been able to measure up to the PS4.
I mean, it's not a coincidence that Xbox
hasn't released official sales numbers
for the One in quite a few years now.
I don't think it's an exaggeration
to say that this upcoming console generation
is a make or break for Xbox,
either Scarlett does well and is a huge success,
or the Xbox brand gets absorbed into a PC
and cloud based soup of disappointments.
Microsoft have been clear, this time around,
they're focusing on gaming.
One of the key new features
will be the addition of custom SSD.
Now this will be standard on all of the Scarlett models
released so far as we know,
and this proves to be a huge, huge benefit for gamers.
Now this generation, we've had a lot of memory,
a lot of CPU resources,
and so we've been able to have some
incredibly detailed open worlds,
but the problem has been when it actually comes
to load those open worlds,
it takes forever on these standard
slow hard drives that we have right now.
I mean, Red Dead 2 feels like it takes
like two minutes just to get into the game.
And mind you, once you get in,
a lot of times load times aren't so bad,
but I mean, it's a hugely frustrating experience
to like fast travel and wait a minute
just for something to load,
whereas with an SSD, instead of waiting that minute,
you might only have to wait a of couple seconds.
The reason the current generation games
are so slow to load almost entirely comes down
to their very, very slow laptop based hard drives.
Now back in 2013, this made perfect sense.
SSDs back then were incredibly expensive.
However, today here in 2019, SSDs are much, much cheaper.
I think it's completely reasonable for Microsoft
to ship either a 500 gig or perhaps
even a one terabyte SSD standard for the Xbox
without it being an obscenely expensive console.
Although it might be obscenely expensive for other reasons,
I just think the SSD is probably
pretty reasonable in the grand scheme of things.
Then there's the spec.
So this generation,
we're looking at an absolutely massive increase to the CPU.
Now I've already gone in depth on sort of the performance
that you might be able to expect on this,
you guys can check out that video,
but TLDR, the next generation consoles
will have significantly faster CPUs,
somewhere in the neighborhood of two to three times better
on the kind of the conservative estimate.
Now the graphics won't be quite as big of a leap,
mostly because the current generation of consoles
actually have solid graphics.
So when you do compare to something like the One X,
we should see somewhere around a doubling of GPU horsepower,
which is certainly not nothing but its nowhere near the same
kind of jump that we saw going from like PS3 to PS4.
And in large part, that's because
not only are the graphics fairly up to date,
we're also no longer chasing the teraflop wars.
A lot of the basic stuff behind the new AMD Navi GPUs
is that they're focusing less on that raw compute number
that has always been quoted as teraflops
and more so on features
that are specifically focused on gamers.
We've got the 8K support which,
good luck seeing games running at 8K,
but it also does support a full 120 frames per second,
as well as variable refresh rates.
Then there's also some brand new techs such as ray tracing,
which will be up and running on the brand new Xbox Scarlett.
Now this is something we actually
know a little bit less about.
So they've talked about it,
however, AMD has kept their cards pretty close to the chest.
So really, the only good example of ray tracing
we have right now is what Nvidia is doing
on the PC space with the RTX line.
Now, if you're not familiar,
ray tracing is actually fairly straightforward.
It allows light in game to act pretty much
like light act in real life, it can bounce, it can scatter,
as opposed to a lot of current games
which require a lot of, shall we say workarounds,
to actually get things to look decent.
Ray tracing does a lot of that work for you,
or at least gives you the tools to.
Now the really cool part about this
is that when you look at games such as Metro Exodus
as well as Battlefield,
you can see early glimpse of what
RTX and ray tracing will allow you to do
but as this becomes more and more standard
across the next generation of consoles,
it should mean that this is going
to be coming to everyone, right?
If you take all of this and combine it
with a lot of these smart moves
that Microsoft has been making lately,
including supporting not only original Xbox games,
but also the 360 and the Xbox One on the Scarlett,
and on top of that, the Scarlett should also support
most Xbox One accessories like the Elite controller,
although maybe not Kinect,
that might not actually make the cut.
So Microsoft has huge ambitions
for their xCloud streaming service,
which will allow you to play
Xbox games pretty much anywhere,
perhaps even with a small little
streaming Xbox of their own.
Now, to be fair, Sony has access to a lot
of these building blocks especially on the hardware side,
however, it does seem at least from the outside,
like Microsoft is executing better.
They've made tons of smart decisions
over the last few years with the Xbox One,
all which is pretty much rolling into Scarlett,
and especially considering that Microsoft
is putting their giant piles of cash
to work by purchasing a lot of studios,
it does seem like the Xbox Scarlett
should be launching at a much better position
than the Xbox One ever was in.
All I can is this, going into 2020,
we're in store for an incredibly interesting
console war between the PS5, the Xbox Scarlett,
and especially considering the Nintendo
hasn't even started talking about
what they're doing next generation,
I'm really, really amped,
it's a very, very good time to be a gamer.
(soft music)