This New Xbox Series X Image Makes A Very Big Promise – Forbes

Sony may have just revealed the logo for the PlayStation 5, but Microsoft was able to match that low-key announcement with an inscrutable image of its own yesterday. A couple of Microsoft executives, including Xbox head Phil Spencer, just changed their Twitter profile pictures to an intriguing piece of hardware that appears to be the processor for the Xbox Series X, here identified by its codename, “Project Scarlett”. Let’s take a look:

On its own, this image might mean something to some people, but those people probably all either work at either AMD or Microsoft and know how to interpret the external form factor of a processor. For everyone else, the salient information is etched into the processor itself:

“8K”.

It’s a big promise that we’ve heard before, but, for the uninitiated, 8K is roughly twice the K of 4K, the current industry standard for a big number you can put next to a thing. In a practical sense, this means that the Xbox Series X could theoretically output images at 4 times the pixel density of the Xbox One X. This is a massive leap in terms of resolution, especially at a time when plenty of people are still gaming in standard HD.

I sit about four feet away from a 65-inch screen hooked up to a powerful gaming PC, meaning that I am likely up there in the 99th percentile of people who stand a chance to notice resolution bumps. And even in that scenario, it’s nearly impossible to imagine that I’d be able to notice the jump from 4K to 8K, even if I was for some reason willing to sacrifice the performance necessary to achieve that resolution. And that’s assuming that I’m willing to shell out for an 8K display big enough to stand a chance of me noticing that it’s 8K.

My guess is that it takes some fancy upscaling footwork to get any kind of resolution up that high for games, and that at the beginning this will only apply to video, in much the same way the Xbox One S can play 4K video but not render 4K games. I would be surprised if anyone is playing any game in native 8K after the Xbox Series X comes out in the fall, but it’s still a big number that you can etch onto a processors.