Microsoft’s presentation at E3 2019 was full of promises about the technical capabilities of Xbox Project Scarlett. Of course, console presentations are always a blend of buzzwords and crunchy tech morsels, the wedge salad approach to info-sharing. But which bits are nonsense, and which can tell us something concrete about the Scarlett’s power?
For instance, we know the Scarlett will have custom-designed hardware featuring the newest AMD chips: the third-generation Ryzen CPU and Navi graphics technology. While that all seems important, the custom-designed part of the processors is industry-standard at this point; the current generation of both the Xbox and PlayStation consoles featured custom designs. As for the Zen 2 architecture and Navi GPU, neither have been officially released yet, so we don’t have full specs on them at the moment.
Not everything from the presentation was tech fluff, though; Scarlett will have real-time ray tracing, which is a huge leap forward for graphics capabilities. No longer just the domain of pre-rendered cutscenes, gameplay will finally be elevated by high-quality lighting effects this technology offers.
Watch the video above to learn which parts of Scarlett you should look forward to, and which parts were just filler.
