Scarlett Takes Xbox To The Next Level

Microsoft’s next-gen machine offers 8K gaming, faster load times, new streaming possibilities, and launches with Halo Infinite

The future of Xbox is rapidly galloping towards us… we just don’t know what it’s called quite yet. Microsoft played it relatively coy at this year’s E3, promising its next console – still codenamed Project Scarlett – will launch with Halo Infinite around ‘holiday 2020’. And that was about your lot. Alright, so we know the successor to Xbox One will be insanely powerful and support 8K gaming and ray tracing, yet beyond that Scarlett is still shrouded in a fair bit of mystery.

Clearly, this new box is still at the project stage, because Microsoft still hasn’t given it an official moniker. While we await the arrival of Xbox Two/Xbox 720/whatever the nextgen machine ends up being named, we at least have some stone cold facts we weren’t privy to last month. The headlines? Scarlett supports 8K gaming up to a blistering 120fps, it comes with an SSD installed for faster loading times, and it’s allegedly four times more powerful than Xbox One X.

For those of us that still play our consoles on 1080p TVs, the addition of a new type of solid-state drive may actually prove to be Scarlett’s true killer feature. Far faster than traditional HDDs, SSDs can read and process data a lot more quickly than the hard drive inside an Xbox One. In practical terms, it means Scarlett games should boot up almost instantly, hopefully killing the lengthy load times that still blight many current-gen titles.

State of play

Imagine an open world where every area is instantly accessible without having to sit through an initial 60-second load screen, a la Red Dead Redemption II. With Scarlett, that could be the new reality. The new console will also make use of virtual RAM, leading to a performance boost over 40 times that of Xbox One S when combined with this new kind of SSD. In essence, Scarlett could all but kill loading times.