Xbox One Scorpio revealed as the super-powerful Xbox One X

Alan Martin June 12, 2017

If you’ve been playing a game of console one-upmanship with yourself since this generation kicked off on 22 November 2013, you’ve already spent quite a lot. The Xbox One launched on that day but was immediately outdone in terms of raw power by the PlayStation 4 a week later. Then there was a bit of a lull until last August, when Microsoft gave the Xbox One a boost with the HDR-supporting Xbox One S. Then Sony really blew things apart this March with the PS4 Pro. Currently, that’s the most powerful console you can buy.

Until 7 November, that is, when the arms race kicks off again with the Xbox One X. The console previously known as Project Scorpio is now official, and it’ll go for a whopping $499 – or £449 in the UK. This actually isn’t much more than the Xbox One cost on launch, although it has since had substantial price cuts since.

So how much more powerful is it? A lot more, as it goes. The Xbox One X comes with six teraflops of graphic prowess, comfortably beating the PS4 Pro’s 4.2 teraflops. The GPU engine runs at 1,172MHz, a large jump from the 853MHz found on the Xbox One and 911MHz in the PS4 Pro. It has 12GB of GDDR5 RAM and a 2.3GHz CPU. It’s a beast, comparatively speaking.

But what does that actually mean in terms of performance? Well, Microsoft has promised that Xbox One games currently locked to 900p or 1080p should run natively at 4K, and will get a performance boost across the board. It should be repeated, however, that Microsoft sees the Xbox One consoles as a single family and intends for the vast majority of games to work across all three systems. You’ll just get the best performance on Xbox One X.

It’s comfortably the most powerful console ever made, and the price seems to compare well to a gaming PC that offers similar performance, but it is still £100 more than the PS4 Pro. This represents a big ask for those that don’t analyse every benchmarking video before making their purchasing decisions. We’ll find out if the gamble pays off when the console launches worldwide on 7 November 2017.