At E3 2016, Microsoft unveiled Project Scorpio and promised the most powerful console ever made. They delivered one year later when the hardware specifications were revealed to be far ahead of Sony's PlayStation 4 Pro, though the premium experience will be paired with a premium price for consoles - $499.
Microsoft's Head of Xbox Operations Dave McCarthy was interviewed by MCVUK on the Xbox One X reveal at Microsoft's E3 2017 briefing and he stated that the company intended to bring an overall "premium PC experience" to the console space for the first time.
The way we look at it, choice feels like the right principle right now. There are consumers that really want to balance price against capabilities. But there will always be customers in your segment of gamers that want the best of the best, and I think that up until now the PC space was really the only place they could go to get that. They now have the ability to get that in the console space.
We’re all about the developer choice there overall. Different developers are going to choose to do different things for different game formats. But the good news is that the Xbox One SDK that everyone writes to will be able to handle that variation. You don’t need a unique version for Xbox One X. It’s just going to know if I’m running a One X, will take advantage of it and going to feel like a premium PC experience overall.
It will be up to the developers to choose between boosting to visuals or the frame rate.
It’s been very, very straightforward for developers to get stuff up-and-running in a day or two on Xbox One X. And what’s exciting about that, for us, is that it leaves them the headroom to do what they want, whether that’s to take advantage of a 2,160 frame buffer, or push their frame rate to the absolute max.
The Xbox One X is coming out in stores worldwide (though there may be some countries with a delayed launch) on November 7th. Are you getting one?
