Gamers won’t be able to buy Microsoft’s next console this coming holiday season, but can look forward to doing so during the Holiday 2020 window. That’s when, as revealed today, Microsoft is planning to release its next Xbox, which goes by the code name of Project Scarlett.
With Project Scarlett, Microsoft is promising to put gamers first, and wants to create something that is “transformative,” as opposed to being “just another console.” This means more immersion and detail, as well as reduced loading times. Those are just a few things that those behind the machine are targeting, though, as you’ll hear through their new trailer.
This high-end gaming console will utilize a custom designed CPU based on AMD’s Zen 2 and Radeon RDNA architecture, and promises to be four times more powerful than the Xbox One X, which currently stands as the most powerful console on the market. To help with this, Microsoft will also be utilizing GDDR6 RAM, which it says will “usher in resolution and framerates we’ve never seen before.”
Thanks to the things under its proverbial hood, Project Scarlett will be able to support 8K gaming with framerates of up to 120 frames-per-second. It will also be able to support ray-tracing and variable refresh rate support, and is set to include an SSD drive. Through this, it could potentially boost performance 40x over the current generation of consoles, drastically improving load times.
“We’ve created a new generation of SSDs. We’re using the SSD as virtual RAM,” says a Microsoft employee.
As we previously posted, Halo Infinite will be one of Project Scarlett’s launch titles, and will likely end up being its most popular one for obvious reasons.