
The Xbox One X: Initial Impressions - deafcalculus
https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/13/the-xbox-one-x-initial-impressions/
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subb
You can get "true 4k" out of the console, but rendering at 4K is so taxing
you'll chew all the extra processing power out of that GPU. That means that if
developers want to increase rendering quality other than spatial resolution,
they will probably resort to checkerboard rendering and/or dynamic resolution,
which they needed to do on PS4 Pro. Of course, overall, you can probably
expect better quality than a PS4 Pro, since there's more power. It's just not
very wise to use that to output at 4k, especially when most people will have a
hard time noticing the difference at living room distance from their TV.

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pwthornton
Agreed. They are pushing 4K for marketing, but if developers largely aimed for
1080p, 60fps with HDR, the games would probably look a lot better, especially
since most people do not have a 4K TV that they sit close enough to to even
tell the difference.

It kind of makes me sad.

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ClassyJacket
1440p might be a nice middle ground for people with 4k TVs. Depends how much
antialiasing you can drop when you bump the resolution. Personally I'd be fine
with chrckerboard rendering if it looks good in practice and allows higher
quality graphics. True 4K could be reserved for VR.

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MBCook
I'm kind of amazed this made it to the front page considering there is so
little here.

I don't see how MS intends to sell them though. The Xbox One S is currently
$200. Even if that's temporary it seems like a lock that they might drop the
price again to $200 for the holidays.

A PS4 Pro is $400 assuming no bundles or price cuts.

So how in the world do you get people to pay $500 for the Xbox One X? It's
2.5x as expensive as your previous/current/lower-end console. It's at least
25% more than the competition's high end console.

And that's price, so it doesn't include the ecosystem and software and such.

$500 just seems like a big obstacle to success.

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vesrah
Where is it for $200 right now?

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CameronBanga
Yeah, I also want to know the answer to this lol.

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janvdberg
Xbox = XB Xbox 360 = 360 Xbox One = XBO Xbox One X = XBOX

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floatboth
"One X" and "One S", where have I seen that before…

[http://www.gsmarena.com/htc_one_s-4574.php](http://www.gsmarena.com/htc_one_s-4574.php)

[http://www.gsmarena.com/htc_one_x-4320.php](http://www.gsmarena.com/htc_one_x-4320.php)

also
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-X](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-X)

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sremani
This is an interesting play, where Microsoft will sell both XBox One S and
XBox One X as contemporary devices.

X => $499 (4k native being the prime attraction) S => $249 (Original perf bit
less than PS4)

Have to see how Games world would react to the reality of optimizing for two
Consoles and Single plat.

Depends on 4K TVs popular uptake. Interesting times!

~~~
sqeaky
Devs seem to be optimizing for an infinite variations of PCs just fine.

Modern consoles on a hardware level are closer to PCs than they have been in
the past. Pick good algorithms, plan ahead to use as much as of the available
resources as possible (but no more) and know what variables you can scale on.
This is general game optimization for any platform. Only when the profiler's
show you issues in one platform and not the will game devs need to break out
#ifdefs and write high level game code differently.

This isn't like ye olden time of the original NES where the whole game must be
written in handcrafted insanely optimized assembly. There are fewer major
architectural decisions to make that are significant between platforms. It
used to be that one system had memory dedicate to parallax scrolling and
another had memory dedicate to rotating texture in increments other than 90
degrees, now they all do most basic operations pretty well and the expensive
things are all expensive in the same way.

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Fej
One of the things that no one seems to notice about the XboneX is hidden down
in the spec sheet.

FreeSync. It supports FreeSync. This is weirdly interesting... perhaps an
attempt by AMD to push back against G-Sync's dominance.

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faragon
Can someone explain how if the PS4 (without "pro") with its 2 GFLOPS is not
able to run complex games at 1080p at 60Hz, while the the XBox One X, with
just 6 GFLOPS, is marketted as able to render games at 60Hz in 4K? Note that
4K requires 4 times the fillrate of 1080p, and that the memory bandwidth
increase is just about +50%, and the CPU performance increase has been small
in comparison.

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mort96
Isn't a lot of the "4k" in consoles really just rendering at a lower
resolution and upscaling?

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anonova
Yes, a lot of games target 1800p with checkboard rendering and upscale to
2160p. The PS4 has native hardware acceleration for checkerboard rendering.[1]
[2]

[1]: [http://wccftech.com/blow-checkerboard-rendering-ps4pro-
isnt-...](http://wccftech.com/blow-checkerboard-rendering-ps4pro-isnt-
completely-free-might-better-uses-power/) [2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checkerboard_rendering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checkerboard_rendering)

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SurrealSoul
I am expecting a Xbox 3 at some point, so that way microsoft will follow
tesla's naming schema Xbox S, Xbox [3], Xbox X Tesla S, Tesla 3, Tesla X

S3X sells.

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bhhaskin
Xbox One == XBO Xbox One X == XBOX

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Richs99
I don't really get the argument that not many people have 4k TVs, or wouldn't
be thinking of getting one anyway this year.

I've had one for 2 years and I'd hardly call myself an early adopter when it
comes to TV.

You can pick up a 49" 4k for considerably less than the price of the X1X these
days, hardly a massive commitment to fully appreciate the better GFX

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tonvei
Why in the world would you buy a 49" 4k tv. You would need to sit like 3 feet
away to even notice a difference between 1080

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faragon
Is the "new Microsoft" going to allow running Linux in that device? I would
buy one, in that case.

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grillvogel
i'm pretty skeptical of this thing. the only people who care about specs are
the pc gaming crowd, and the specs are probably still not good enough for
them. the software library is also basically a subset of the playstation game
library, with hardly any unique microsoft exclusives.

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Frenchgeek
tl;dr; It's small and the graphics look nice.

