One Week with Xbox One X
Not since the launch of the Xbox 360 have I been so excited about the POWER of a console. Consoles used to represent an excellent value proposition, thanks to their business model of selling hardware more or less at cost and making money on software.
With the launch of the PS4/One, both Sony and Microsoft were very transparent about their specs. And both of them were selling…a variant of the same average-tier PC hardware.
It was hard to get too excited about this.
Many hardcore gamers at the time already owned PCs with better specs. The PS4 and Xbox One felt like hedged bets. Aside from a few fun touches, like the GDDR5 on the PS4 and the ESRAM on the Xbox One, nothing about the new consoles screamed POWER the way that hardware of old did.
With the Xbox One X, that’s changed. Thank goodness!
No one thought it mattered
Neither Sony nor Microsoft thought that console power really mattered in 2013.
But then it turned out that the original PS4 had just enough of a GPU power advantage that it could run games at a slight resolution boost compared to the Xbox One. This lead to it being deemed “the most powerful console” by players and games press, and when combined with its initial price advantage, it jumped out to a sales lead that no one saw coming.
Iteration is the new generation
The yearly upgrade cycle of cell phones inspired both Sony and Microsoft to push their consoles towards a similar setup, and Microsoft wasn’t about to be left behind again in the renewed power race.
I owned a PS4 Pro for about 9 months. It’s a totally fine machine. However, I have a 1080p monitor, and the experience was all over the place. Some games still ran in full resolution mode and then downsampled for my screen. Others ran in a mode that mimicked the base hardware, giving me no discernible improvements whatsoever.
Further, when the PS4 Pro launched, it had no sort of enhanced functionality for non-patched games. Eventually, Sony added Boost Mode…but this setting is buried in a menu and comes with a big warning to users that it might cause issues.
Microsoft didn’t make any of these mistakes.
They went all-in on GPU power, with a chip that has a similar power level to an RX 580.
They mandated on the back end that all games render at their highest possible resolution and then scale to your display. So 4K games always render at 4K and then downsample to my 1080p screen.
They also auto-boost all unpatched games, giving them full access to the upgraded CPU and GPU, forcing vsync, and forcing 16x anisotropic filtering. Many old games have load time and resolution improvements as well.
Like the old days
I have a decent PC gaming rig, with an i7 6700, 16 gigs of RAM, and a Founder’s Edition GTX 1070.
The Xbox One X provides a similar, and sometimes better gaming experience, depending on the amount of optimization work that the game has had.
This is totally awesome!
When the 360 first launched, it crushed the PC I owned at the time…and I’ve never really had that feeling since from a console.
Nintendo has long been doing their own thing, power-wise. And I think that’s really smart. I also think they’ve opened room for the other companies to compete on power…something they weren’t really interested in until this spec bump.
Assassin’s Creed Origins is a perfect example of the power and pleasant optimization experience of the Xbox One X. It was marketed as the flagship platform for the game, and I don’t think this was just PR talk.
The PC version has been a mess since launch. It’s had numerous performance issues even on powerful hardware. It’s had patches that have lowered average framerates for some players. Ubisoft even disabled Dolby Atmos support in the game “temporarily” to make some older surround headsets work properly in the game.
I put the word “temporarily” in quotes because, as of this writing, it still isn’t back.
The Xbox One X runs the game perfectly. The framerate stays locked at 30. The resolution is stunningly high, often approaching true 4K. On my 1080p screen, there’s never even a hint of aliasing. And the Dolby Atmos support is in full effect, giving the game a fun and breathtaking soundscape when I use headphones.
It’s a tremendously enjoyable experience. On my PC, I struggled to get the game running at a stable framerate at 1080p. On early patches, it used to hit 60 without too much issue…and now it kind of swings all over the place. I could try locking the game to 30, but the framerate limiter in the game has its own issues and forcing it through the Nvidia control panel requires different tweaks to the in-game settings.
And even then I won’t have Atmos back.
Cutting through all that and watching the game just run perfectly on the One X has been a delightful gaming experience in comparison.
Final thoughts
The Xbox One X is the best game console since the Xbox 360 for people that care about power, graphics, and smooth overall experiences. It truly does offer PC-like gaming capability in a box that costs 500 bucks.
Sure, Microsoft’s first-party lineup has been a little soft. But it’s still got some heavy hitters like Halo, Gears, and Forza. And their third party offering is currently the best on any console, thanks to the enhanced power of the X. There’s also a great selection of indie titles available.
If someone asked me whether they should buy a gaming PC or an X…I’d actually recommend the X right now. In a few years it might be different, but right now there’s no better value for the money, if you care about power.
It’s not like you can even buy a nice video card right now anyway, even if you wanted to. But that’s a tale for another time!
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This article was written by Super Jump contributor, Alex Rowe. Please check out his work and follow him on Medium.
