Why The Xbox Series X Could Be In For A Tough Time

James is worried about the Xbox

- James Martin

Can you hear it? Can you feel it? Can you see it? Well, probably not. But you can hear the YouTube videos revving up. The Digital Foundry videos commenting on the leaks, rumours, and whispers circling the world wide web. The tension between the /r/ XboxSeriesX and /r/PS5 subreddits on Reddit.

That’s right, we’re in new console season! Much like Francis, who also wrote about his apprehension for the next round of consoles, it only feels like yesterday (or, rather, a just a few months ago perhaps…) since I was eagerly ripping the Amazon cardboard apart to get at my new console.

But it’s now time to look forward into the bright and wonderful future ahead of us! It is rumoured that it’s only going to be mere weeks until we have a full PlayStation 5 reveal, in which we will hopefully see a much bigger picture of what we’ll be expecting come release date. We do already know that it’s going to include an APU from AMD, including their latest Zen 2 CPU architecture and Navi based GPU, with hardware ray tracing support.

For myself, it’s this last point that I’m most interested to hear about, because as of this moment, AMD has no hardware ray tracing support on any of its desktop GPUs. Nvidia has led the way in this department with their RTX branded GPUs, although performance is not great, to be kind.

The CPU, however, we already know is streets ahead of the aging Jaguar based CPU in the PlayStation 4. Leaks have suggested Sony are going for something equivalent to the Ryzen 5 3700X, with 8 cores and 16 threads, although it’ll be run at a lower clock speed than its desktop equivalent to control power usage and, consequently, heat output. For the GPU we can look towards the 5700 XT for around a similar performance benchmark.