- This is the Xbox Series X.
It is real and I have it in my hands right now.
Don't believe me?
Well let me show you.
So, first of all, Microsoft were very kind to invite us out
for a very early look at the Series X.
Now keep in mind that this is not final hardware,
this won't be shipping until almost the end of the year.
However it is definitely going to be our best look
at what the next generation of console experience
can really provide.
In this video not only am I giving you a sneak peek
at what's inside the Series X,
but on top of that we have gameplay
and pretty much every spec you might wanna know.
So today is a very good day because I can actually
walk you through exactly what is inside the Xbox Series X.
So to start with we have to look at the mainboard,
or specifically the dual mainboards.
Because of the unique design of the Series X
it actually has a very unusual cooling system.
One of the things I'm most excited about
is just how powerful the SOC inside the Series X is.
So there's a lot to talk about here
but first I wanna go over the actual CPU spec.
So keep in mind this is an SOC that has not only
the CPU and the GPU onboard,
and yet they're able to fit eight Zen 2 cores
that can clock all the way up to 3.8 gigahertz.
And that's not some kind of like boost speed,
it can run it 3.8 gigahertz, sustained, pretty much forever.
You have a couple of options
if you're a developer with this guy.
So if you want multi-threading you actually have to drop
from 3.8 to 3.6 gigahertz,
but a lot of developers are probably gonna be fine
with eight very fast cores onboard.
Now when it actually comes to games,
seven of those cores are available to a game
and one is reserved for Windows
and the OS in the background.
But that's a lot of power, especially considering
that most of this chip is actually graphics.
They just threw in eight cores
because it's much better than the previous generation.
And by much better, I mean four times better.
On top of that we have some seriously powerful graphics.
So onboard we have twice the graphics horsepower
of the Xbox One X, which I would just keep in mind,
only came out a couple years ago,
or two and a half years ago, at this point.
And beyond that we also have
eight times the graphics horsepower
of the original Xbox One.
So there are a couple of really interesting things here.
So first of all this is taking advantage of AMD's
brand-new RDNA 2.0 architecture,
which is not even out on the PC yet.
There's a lot that comes with that
and there are also some customizations
that Microsoft has done specifically for the Series X.
So, for example, there is not only ray tracing built in,
but also there's some specific hardware and audio engines
that have been built into the chip.
But the GPU itself is massive,
we're looking at 52 CUs at 1825 megahertz.
Now if you're not a speeds and feeds kind of person
that might not mean anything,
but this is an incredibly huge graphics card,
or GPU, I suppose,
and it is running at very very high clocks.
So with a Series X dev kit here
the first game I'm going to try is "Minecraft".
Now this is no ordinary version of Minecraft.
This is, to be fair, a very early technical demo,
but this is incorporating ray tracing.
So you can see, standard lighting,
looks like "Minecraft" as you expect.
However, I turn it on, the game is completely transformed.
I mean, can you see the difference here?
That's crazy, you can even see how
the lava's reflecting on the actual material of the rails.
Awesome. (chair squeaking)
That's a really squeaky chair, how annoying is that?
I get I shouldn't get up, huh?
Not only is the lighting completely transformed
but you actually can see some real depth in the world
that obviously when you have ray tracing off,
it's fine, it's sort of very brightly lit
as you're expecting with "Minecraft".
When you turn on it makes a huge difference.
Just look at the way that the torch is naturally reflecting,
and you actually can see how there's real texture
and there's real depth in the gold.
And if you look on this side you can see the diamond here.
It's really cool at how much this sort of brings
the "Minecraft" world to live.
And as we walk into this room with a bunch of
glowstone and glass panes in front,
with standard "Minecraft" lighting it looks fine,
but it really doesn't do much.
You can just sort of see a little bit of light come through.
When I turn on ray tracing it completely changes the scene.
You can see how it's almost like a rainbow effect
and the light naturally sort of cascades.
This is just a tech demo, so it is a an early look
at what ray tracing will do on the Series X.
But, I mean, it makes a huge difference, just look at that.
That's crazy.
Next I have some gameplay of "Gears 5"
running on the Xbox Series X now.
This is a very early build,
it only took them a few weeks to get this up and running,
and therefore probably some other things
are going to be tweaked and changed
before it finally comes out.
However a couple of key things to keep in mind
is that not only is this running at 4K60
with all of the ultra PC presets enabled,
they even added some additional settings
that were not even able to run on the PC or the Xbox One X.
So sit back grab your popcorn and enjoy some
true Series X gameplay.
- [JD] Okay now, open fire!
(explosions blasting)
(monsters roaring)
Del, we got a nest.
- [Del] Toss a frag, close it up!
- [JD] Got him!
(dramatic music)
(upbeat funky music)
- Feeding the SOC is a full 16 gigabytes of GDDR6 memory,
which you actually can see is arranged
around the chip like this.
So it's actually a slightly unusual configuration.
So Microsoft are taking advantage of a 320 bit memory bus,
and that's because there's a mixture of
one gig and two gig modules.
Now as the end user
you're probably not gonna notice any of this,
but as a developer you actually have
two classes of memory available.
So there's 10 gigs of GPU optimized memory,
which is essentially the fastest RAM
for, obviously, the graphics.
However, you also have a further 3.5 gigs
which can be played with, it's slightly slower
but, you know, you have to offload
your audio or something to that, you can use that.
Now it's kind of interesting to think
because on top of that you have a further 2.5 gigs of ram,
which is partitioned off for the OS and apps
and that kind of thing.
Now when you look at this it might not actually seem
super impressive, right?
We've got four times the CPU power,
we've got up to eight times the GPU power
compared to the Xbox One,
but we only have about double the memory.
In fact, even less if you compare to the Xbox One X.
However, there's actually one other thing here
which is helping to improve the memory story.
So you flip the board over
we'll see another major improvement,
which is the standard one terabyte SSD.
This is actually a big component of why the Series X
is able to be a big leap forward in a lot of ways.
So of course the previous generation
was bottlenecked by fairly slow hard drives.
It made sense back on the time,
but in 2020 we expect more speed,
and every Series X game also expects to have a SSD.
So this is a PCI 4.0 SSD.
It is, of course, been custom designed by Microsoft,
so it's actually fairly powerful.
It can pull almost four watts by itself,
which is part of the reason why it's
shielded and cooled in this sort of way.
But there's actually a couple of
very interesting things they're doing.
So first of all, like I said, all games expect to have
access to all this performance at all times, right?
So the CPU, the GPU they're all gonna sit
at that very consistent clock speed
and the same goes for the SSD.
So you're getting 2.4 gigabytes per second
pretty much period.
They've done a lot of optimizations, of course,
on the latency side, which is important
because you actually can pull stuff straight off of the SSD
straight to memory, so essentially it will kind of
expand that 16 gigabytes based on how developers use it.
But the, I don't wanna say downside,
but one of the things you have to consider
is that while, yes, you can plug in a USB hard drive
and play games off of that on the Series X
you can't play Series X games,
just simply because they expect that high level of speed.
So if you have your Xbox One games on a hard drive
you can plug in, it'll be just fine.
But if you want more than one terabyte of space
on your Series X you're gonna want one of these guys.
So this is a little Seagate expansion module.
So there actually were some rumors beforehand
about this little mystery port here which they
very cleverly not shown until this point.
Essentially that means that you can expand with another SSD
right into the back of the system.
It looks like a memory card,
but this is actually a full one terabyte SSD
which essentially gives you the exact same performance
of your standard SSD, and of course you can imagine
with that expansion port on the back,
maybe larger capacities,
maybe you could own a couple of these.
We'll see how expensive they are, to be fair.
So this next demo is of quick resume.
So to give you a little bit of context here
we're not gonna do any cuts here
to show you just how fast this is.
So I have a Series X controller,
I am playing on this actual Series X.
So right now I have "State of Decay" up,
or "State of Decay 2", rather, up.
You can see it playing on the Series X,
works just as you would expect.
However, say I want to, I don't know, play "Forza"?
Well if I switch over to it
you can see just how quick it's going to move.
So essentially in the background
it's saving "State of Decay" in its own VM.
So I can jump in and, look, I'm playing "Forza" now,
it's that fast.
Whoa, whoa, okay.
Well it might be that fast, I am not that fast. (laughs)
All right, hold on.
I'm gonna actually get back on the track here,
you can see "Forza" is running just fine,
and if I want I can jump over to, say, "Hellblade".
Again, you can see how fast it loads,
in the background it is saving my "Forza" game.
And, there we go, boom, I'm now into another game.
Now the cool part about this is that this is all saved
across, even you shut down the system or whatever,
this is all going to work no matter what.
And keep in mind that these games that I'm playing
are not optimized at all for the Series X,
these are just standard Xbox One games
that you could play right out of the gate.
So if I wanna jump over to a 360 game
all the stuff is being saved directly to that SSD.
It is really cool.
You can imagine what this might look like
if, say, I'm playing on Series X titles
that are actually optimized for this use.
But that is so cool to be able to just have
essentially no load times going between.
You can see this is my fifth game and, again, no problems.
Right in, boom.
- [Ken] Go back to "State of Decay".
- Oh, yeah, you'll see it's all still loaded up here.
You can see, we're what?
Three, four seconds between these games,
depending on which one we're at.
Look, "State of Decay", it jumps right on the internet
without even missing a beat.
But that is a good look at the actual
hardware behind the Series X,
but the rest of the supporting components,
I think, are really interesting
because there's a lot that goes in
to putting together the Xbox Series X.
Microsoft's have actually set up
a very cool little demo here, where most of these parts
are obviously slightly modified, they're magnetized.
But essentially I can put together the Series X
and show what it looks like from top to bottom.
So to start out with we have this center chassis.
So this is a piece of aluminum
which actually preserves a bunch of functions.
So now I just helped give some structure
but everything attaches to it.
So let's see if I can do this right,
I'm gonna start out with the rear I/O board.
I know how to do this, I'll definitely get it right.
It's fine.
Which goes in like this.
So you can see there are a ton of air channels here
but essentially it should just go with the I/O facing out.
And look at that.
Look how good I am at building things.
All the guys who designed this are standing right over here,
I'm definitely getting a little nervous. (chuckles)
No judgment, it's fine.
Okay, so, the next step would be to take
the other part of the mainboard
and it should just attach like this.
So you can see essentially we have
the SOC and the memory facing this way
and then we have the other mainboard facing this way,
with our SATA port and some of our various connectors
with the southbridge.
You can see that the I/O all comes together like this.
So this would stick out the back of the console.
So with this level of power there is a lot of, well,
literal power flowing through the chip
and all of that has to go somewhere,
and that somewhere is a
ridiculous, ridiculous vapor chamber.
So while the Xbox One X was the first Xbox
to feature a vapor chamber, this is a whole other level.
So not only do you have the aluminum fins on the back
where air flow will pass through,
but you can see this is a massive vapor chamber.
So actually if I take off the SOC, here, you can kinda get
a little bit of an idea what this looks like.
So essentially the SOC will go on
with this little section right here,
so it'll cool not only the chip but also the VRM around it.
And then you also have all of your GDDR6 memory
which can also make contact here.
But there's certainly a lot of heat
that has to be dissipated by this vapor chamber.
So let's see if I can actually put it together.
So next we have the SOC chassis
which goes on something like this.
(upbeat music)
Almost there.
Oh, there we go.
All right, all right.
Next I need to put the vapor chamber on,
which obviously will go something like this.
There we go.
Okay, that starting to look a little bit more like an Xbox.
Now we have the power supply.
This is a very compact unit.
I remember back when the Xbox One came out,
the original, and it had that huge external supply.
Well now we've got a 300 watt supply
which not only fits inside,
but is also cooled by the exact same fan, spoiler alert,
that cools the rest of the system.
So I believe this slides on something like this?
Yeah, all right.
That's looking like a shape of a thing.
Next step we have the little bottom shield.
So I slide it on something like this?
Yes!
Next step is the optical drive.
So this is a very similar Blu-ray drive
to what you had on the previous generation,
and believe it goes on something like this.
Hey, look at that!
Now we're getting a little bit more of an Xbox One shape.
I'm sorry, did I say the Xbox One?
Xbox Series X.
Next up we have the fan, and you have to consider
this is the only fan in the entire Xbox Series X.
So it is a very, very custom unit.
So it's a 130 millimeter fan.
And you can see that not only are the blades
really uniquely shaped, but the entire top shroud
is pretty much designed for the optimal airflow
to keep things moving.
'Cause you have to keep in mind, with only one fan,
the airflow has to be very carefully managed.
So if you imagine this is the Series X,
which it is very close to at this point,
air is coming through a few different channels,
so of course a lot of air is passing through the heat sink
on the back of the vapor chamber
and being exhaust at the top.
But air also comes through the center chassis
to cool the various components like the SSD.
We also have to consider that the power supply needs air
which is exhausted underneath this
black little plastic piece.
There's a lot going on here
and it all really starts and ends with the fan.
Which if I can line it up like this,
is essentially how it sits.
Obviously, as someone who builds PCs and stuff,
you see a lot of fans that are exactly the same,
or you see, like, "Oh, we added RGB," or whatever.
But this is such a complicated shape,
especially when you look at the fan blades
and the way that this shroud.
And this is actually kind of interesting.
So you were mentioning this earlier.
So there's a little sort of, like, escape path.
So say someone accidentally put something over the top
there's still the ability for air
to be exhausted through here.
- That's right. - Obviously, it's optimal.
But somebody accidentally puts a book
on top of your Series X it's not gonna immediately go
and completely get all the air cut off.
You've done a lot of cool stuff here.
- There is.
The surfacing around the fan shroud, like you said,
it's super complex
and super driven by the engineering requirements
of getting that air up
and then spread out as wide as possible as it exhausts.
- If you wanna a better visual what this looks like,
there happens to be a wonderful graphic right behind me.
Look it's a tornado of heat and exhaust.
- [Ken] You didn't think that one through did you?
- Didn't think that one through at all.
Everyone the room is very upset with me.
Is not a tornado, it's very carefully managed.
Also, if you look up close which you probably never will
because no one should ever open up your Series X.
I mean, I guess technically it could but you shouldn't.
Inside they're actually a couple of
really interesting Easter eggs.
So first of all a lot of the components
are individually labeled.
So you can see this is number one, the center chassis.
We have the optical disc drive.
They're actually in total of seven of these things.
But my favorite is if you look on the very top of this fan
you'll see a tiny little Master Chief.
No one's ever gonna see this,
but it is very very cool of these guys
to have spent so much time optimizing this layout.
And I know a lot of people are kind of wondering
when you saw the announcement
of why the Xbox is shaped as it is.
But as we put it all together you can see
that there's actually a lot of very clever engineering
that went into putting this together.
I almost have the Series X complete.
The next step is just to put it all in the chassis
which I'm sure I'll get first try, no problem.
(gentle music)
Okay, so I'm going to line it up.
Angle it just a little bit.
Hey wait, wait, wait!
Look, I got it, I got it.
And there we have the Xbox Series X.
Don't look at this side, look at this side.
It's fine, look at that.
Look how beautiful of a job I've done
in developing this console.
(coughs) With no help at all from anyone in this room.
No one just told me how to do that or anything like that.
Thanks guys, appreciate it. (coughing)
So you know I'm gonna have to ask the question
that the entire internet asked
the second one that we saw this.
Why is it this shape?
- Ha, very good question, and it's a good reason.
I mean, you put the box together, you can see how
all of those big components kind of fit together
in this really unique way,
and it's all driven by pulling air through the system
with this big axial fan on the top.
- Are you concerned at all about this not fitting
under people's TVs or anything like that?
- No, I mean, that that's a good question.
We were really conscious about being
able to fit into people's homes, fit into the TV consoles
that they had now on their shelves.
One of the cool things about this is you can,
as you were doing, you can put it down sideways,
you can use it vertically.
It's actually got a really small footprint,
so you can put it on a much shallower shelf
than you ever could before.
So we think it gives people a lot of flexibility
in where they can put it.
- So I know when I first saw this,
and, of course, if you've seen the the announcement video
you'll see that you've got the little scoop on the top,
with what looked like LEDs.
But, in fact, it's sort of more of like
an optical illusion here, right?
- I mentioned that the fan needs to pull a lot of air,
we need really big holes and we decided to embrace that
as a design element.
And we added this slight dish,
on a really deep set of holes here,
so that as you look at it
your view changes and you see more or less inside.
And the green was really kind of a nod to our fans,
a nod to Xbox, it's got like the soul of Xbox inside it.
And it reveals itself as you get closer.
- A new console is nothing without a new controller
and the Series X has some interesting differences.
So you can see we have everything from The Duke
all the way up to the Series X.
And while at first glance this looks
very, very similar to the Xbox One
there actually are some pretty significant differences.
So one of first ones is actually in the size.
So while the grip and everything down here
is pretty much the same,
the top has been tapered a little bit more.
So it's better for smaller hands.
And in fact there's actually a demo here that I have.
It's basically a giant controller
to kind of give you a sense of what it would feel like,
and it's still very comfortable
even if you do have the smaller hands.
Also, this looks hilarious.
So a lot, of course, is very similar.
So the sticks and a lot of the buttons feel the same.
However we do now have a much nicer D-pad.
So it's nicely faceted, it has a nice sort of clicky action,
and we also do have a share button built in.
Now in the bottom it is pretty much identical,
so a lot of accessories,
including your headsets and everything,
should just slide in, no problem, on the bottom.
And if we flip over to the top we now have USB-C.
Now if we open up the back you will see
that we have the exact same setup as the Xbox One.
So it will ship with AA batteries
and you can, of course, still use your Play and Charge Kit.
Obviously, if you really value AA batteries,
that's an option, although rechargeables are definitely
the way that I like to go.
But interestingly this is a very different style
of controller they've done in the past,
mostly because this is actually backwards compatible
with the Xbox One and vice-versa.
So obviously there are some improvements here.
At it's sort of core fundamentals
this is not wildly different than the Xbox One,
which means that if you wanna take your current
Xbox One controller and move it over to the Series X,
or even take a Series X controller and play it on Xbox One
you can absolutely do that.
Now it still does take advantage
of the Xbox wireless radio,
and they've actually done a lot of work
to improve the latency, so that the controller will
update the console more often.
But, interestingly, on top of that, it does, of course,
you can connect it via USB,
but it does have Bluetooth low energy.
So if say you're using this with
an iPhone or an Android or something,
it will be a little bit more energy efficient
and it'll be a little bit quicker.
One very cool demo on this Series X
is the ability to do HDR reconstruction.
So you can see right here we have "Halo 5"
and, keep in mind, it's gonna be very bright
since it's now in HDR.
But essentially what we've got here is a game
which was never originally designed
to have the HDR implementation.
However using some very clever trickery
you can see on this display everything in the orange,
and you see anything in the reds and the whites,
that's actually full HDR color space
which was not originally designed into the game.
To me I can't believe, like, just looking at this.
Yeah, you can see how bright it gets over here,
for a game that was never designed for it.
And the cool thing is this actually works
for more than just like an Xbox One game
that never had HDR.
We got a demo earlier of an original Xbox game,
"Fuzion Frenzy", clearly never designed with HDR in mind
and it still looks great.
Maybe not quite as good as Halo, but you know.
So I have the exact same level loaded up
on both of these Series X dev kits.
So you can see on this we have the full HDR reconstruction
where especially you get a lot of brightness here
and this is a heat map.
So essentially all this is doing is just showing us,
based on the color, where we're really getting that
extra brightness and that extra range
that of course was never designed.
So you can see fire, you can see with this over here.
And if I try to throw a grenade at the same time
you can see, yeah.
Actually, I'll do that again, that's cool. (chuckles)
It's so bright.
Realistically, if this just was the way I played the game
I don't think I would ever realize
that this wasn't something that the developer had intended.
This is something that can be added, and this can be added
with essentially no impact to performance.
What is this called?
We know obviously it's the Xbox Series X.
But we've had the Xbox, we had the 360, we had the One.
What is this generation called?
- This generation's just called Xbox,
and this specific console's the Xbox Series X.
- Okay, gotcha.
So fourth generation Xboxes are just the Xbox.
- Exactly. - Okay.
- [Jason] Absolutely, we want people to be able
to just go in and say, "I want the latest Xbox."
So that's why we named it Xbox.
- You've been working on this for how long now?
- Xbox Series X development started in 2016.
So we've been working on it
for four years. - Before One X?
- Absolutely.
- [Austin] I'm assuming it's gotta be nice
to finally show off your baby.
- That's why we're so excited to have you here,
is to actually be able to start sharing more details
about what the team's been working on
for the last four years.
- I gotta give you props, I did not realize.
First of all, it's kind of crazy to me
that you guys are being this upfront open about a console,
what, six months or whatever before launch.
But on top of that, you've shown us so much stuff
and we get to show so much in the video.
Why are you guys being so open about this ahead of time?
Aren't you afraid that people are gonna be like,
"Oh, steal some notes," or whatever?
What's the thought behind that?
- Honestly, we're just really proud
with what we've actually built.
We've been working on this for so long
and it's finally great to just start sharing more details.
And as we get closer to launch
we're really focused on showing
what the platform can actually do
and the awesome games you'll be able to play.
- You do consider this to be a new generation, though right?
It's definitely-- - Yeah, yeah.
The technology inside of this generation
is so transformative and the kinds of gaming experiences
you're gonna be able to experience
are just so fundamentally different,
and its really unlocked by all the power
that we've put in the box.
- Thank you very much for watching.
If you enjoyed make sure to subscribe to the channel
because there's going to be a whole lot more
on the Series X coming soon.
(gentle upbeat music)