Xbox One X Benchmarks Revealed: How Powerful Is the Console Really?
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The Bright Side
The good news is that the Xbox One X really is a beastly machine capable of pushing games at native 4K resolution -- no checkerboarding -- while maintaining rock-solid 60 fps performance. The star of the show here whenever Microsoft wants to showcase its console's power is Forza Motorsport 7. Forza 7 was built from the ground up on an internal engine that has the Xbox One X in mind, and so the developers were keen to take advantage of the faster RAM and the full suite of console features.
That's not all, though. We're expecting big bumps to games already released on the Xbox One; games like Gears of War 4. Even though Gears was built from the ground up for the original Xbox One, a quick and dirty port job (even without extensive customizations) proves that the Xbox One X will be able to run the game as it is at native 4K while only using about 80% of the GPU's available horsepower. Both of these games will look fantastic in 4K, and the Xbox One X (can we just call it the X1X now?) will have some overhead to spare... probably. We'll have more on that later.
prevnextThe Down Side
Can you guess what the X1X's main limitation will be? I'll give you a hint: it's the same thing holding back the PS4 Pro, and the thing that has typically been holding consoles back every since we started trying to target 1080p 60fps performance. That's right: the CPU.
The Xbox One X will still see some formidable bottlenecks. It's one thing to throw around a 6 TFLOP performance potential and guess at which games will run at 4K and marvel at how great they look in our imaginations, but we have to keep in mind that there will be a lot of humongous, open-world, third-party games that aren't running on an engine tailored to take advantage of everything the X1X has to offer, and frame-rate will always be CPU-bound.
Do not expect games like The Witcher 3, Assassin's Creed Origins, or Anthem to run at native 4K 60fps. In fact, I'm not even sure we can count on Assassin's Creed running at 2160p at a stable 30fps without some tricks of the trade. The Digital Foundry video mentions Assassin's Creed Origins specifically, revealing that the game will utilize dynamic resolution and checkerboarding in order to reach its 2160p target resolution. This isn't such a bad thing, mind you, but it's worth keeping in mind so we don't get inflated expectations.
prevnextHere's the Catch
Please keep in mind that most of the games used for benchmarking were not built from the ground up for the Xbox One X. Also keep in mind that the benchmarks don't represent actual builds of these games running on actual Xbox One X hardware. From what I understand, these are calculations which happen to be missing a few key variations.
Taking games previously released on the Xbox One and them calculating benchmarks based on straight ports to the Xbox One X is a little sloppy. One one hand, the games could actually run better than expected, because the straight ports are not taking into account optimizations and changes made for the X1X's faster memory.
On the other hand, games may actually perform worse than expected here, because if we got an enhanced Gears of War 4 on X1X, it probably wouldn't be a straight port rendered at 4K. There would be enhanced textures, increased draw distances, higher resolution shadows, more reflections and effects... All of those things will take their toll on the GPU, especially at 2160p.
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