Xbox Series X review: A silent 4K beast in need of games

The Xbox Series X is finally here. This machine is a massively powerful gaming console, and feels like an apology for everything that went wrong with the Xbox one. Lower relative price? Check. Big specs? Check. Kinect? Nowhere in sight. The Series X delivers on the promise of gorgeous 4K gaming, and is a well engineered, if bulky machine, but it doesn't have many new games to back it up. Sony's launch slate is stronger, and for folks without a 4k HDR TV, the Series S is much cheaper and probably a better deal. Still, for Xbox fans looking for maximum performance in a sleek design, the Series X isn't going to disappoint.

Video Transcript

DEVINDRA HARDAWAR: The Xbox Series X is an apology for the Xbox One in every way. Microsoft's last console was weighed down by being $100 more at launch than the PS5, even though it had less GPU power and it had a connect accessory that just wasn't very useful.

The company tried to course correct with the midgeneration refreshes, the Xbox One S and Xbox One X, but those didn't really push things as far as they needed to. As of this year, the PS4 is estimated to have sold more than twice as many units as the Xbox One family, and even the Nintendo Switch, which came out several years later, beat Microsoft.

So really I think with the Series X, Microsoft is just trying to get everything right from the start. This has all the hardware you'd want to get 4K gaming at 60 frames per second. That's like a nice standard. And it can even support up to 120 FPS gaming to really give you a PC-like experience. It'll also load everything much faster than before because it has an SSD. And it can even automatically add HDR to your old games. How can you not love that? It's like Microsoft is begging gamers to love them.

And after playing the system for the past week, I can definitely see everything Microsoft is going for, and I think hardcore gamers will just love all the power that they have in here. But the real question is do you really need it? There aren't that many games, so that makes the question kind of complicated.

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So yeah, the Xbox Series X is very, very big, which just seems to be the style for this console generation. These things need to have a ton of hardware in there to pump out 4K gaming, so that makes sense. It measures 6 by 6 inches, and it's about a foot high, almost like a perfect rectangle. We're used to Microsoft systems being pretty boxy, but this one in particular is basically just a shrunken down PC tower.

Over time, I got used to it. It's not quite subtle, but it does eventually blend in with everything underneath my TV. It's a strong and sturdy machine overall. It is just a box, so the plastic feels nice and thick. I think it's the same as the One X. And you know it feels hefty in your hand too, so it doesn't feel like I'm going to break it if this thing falls, which is a problem you'll have with a console in a house with kids.

And there aren't really many design flourishes either. There's a disk slot up front for 4K Blu-rays. There's a single USB port, a button for syncing your controllers, and the little Xbox power button in the top right. That's pretty much it. The one strong bit of style you see is the top of the console, which has these perforated holes, which I think would be a trypophobe's nightmare and a giant fan, probably the biggest fan I've ever seen on a single piece of consumer electronics.

And since it's a big tower, you can orient it both vertically and horizontally pretty easily, and I have to say I appreciate that one side of the system has little rubber feet to tell you that's the way it should go horizontally. That's more than I can say for Sony's.

The system fit pretty cleanly inside my entertainment center, but I also had to make sure there was some open room for the fan to eject hot air out of the console. This is not a machine you'd want to put in a closed cabinet for sure.

So sure, it's just a plastic box, but it's what's under the hood that's really compelling. It's running an 8 core Zen 2 CPU from AMD and also new Radeon RDNA 2 graphics. That's impressive, but remember the PlayStation 5 pretty much has the same hardware. The big difference is Microsoft is really pushing the GPU a couple teraflops further for more performance.

The Xbox Series X and the PS5 offer 16 gigabytes of DDR6 memory, and Microsoft actually pumps up the memory bandwidth even more for 10 gigabytes of that, although 6 gigabytes, the remaining bit, is slower than the PS5's memory bandwidth. I think functionally, you will not notice that as a player, but it is interesting to see how these companies are both trying to optimize memory performance in different ways.

And the other key in the trifecta of great new hardware in the system is the one terabyte NVMe SSD. It's part of Microsoft's new Velocity Architecture, and it is light years ahead of the spinning mechanical drives we've had in the last batch of consoles. Microsoft really needs that extra bandwidth and faster storage because pumping out 4K game textures and files and everything, that takes a lot of bandwidth, so you need faster hardware to deal with that.

There's 802 gigabytes of free storage space on Series X. You can also expand that with Seagate's 1 terabyte SSD expansion card, which costs $220. That drive may seem slightly expensive today, but it's only slightly more than 1 terabyte SSDs that are available for PCs.

And if you've got an old USB 3.1 hard drive laying around, for example one you may have used on the Xbox One X, you can also plug that into the Series X. It'll run all the older games just fine, just like the One X did. Of course, you won't have the load time benefits of an SSD.

You can also throw your Xbox Series X Games onto that drive as cold storage. So if you just need to clear up some space and you don't want to redownload a game, it's a good place to let it sit, but you will have to give it time to transfer games over to that drive and back over to the SSD when you want to play them.

Microsoft clearly put a lot of thought into the console's design. I don't think they tried as hard with the controller. It's basically the Xbox One X controller with a slightly clickier and more distinctive D-pad and a sharing button in between the two middle buttons, so taking a cue from Sony there. There are also some ridges along the handle grips to make it easier to hold on to it as you're getting into sweaty gaming experience.

It's a nice controller, but maybe I'm spoiled by Microsoft's Xbox Elite controller, which is fantastic. And that's what I use on PCs and pretty much everywhere I can. It's a bit disappointing just because I'm looking at this next to Sony's DualSense for the PS5, which feels transformative and next generation in a way that this controller really just doesn't.

So setting up this console is pretty simple. You just plug in the power and HDMI and pick your orientation. That's it. There's no stand or anything else to deal with. You can now use the Xbox mobile app to set up your Wi-Fi and go through the whole process. That kind of failed for me halfway through, unfortunately. I had to continue the setup process with the gamepad. And that wasn't super difficult. It just felt kind of disappointing that one of the first next gen experiences failed right out the gate.

And once it booted up, I was staring at the new Xbox interface, which is fast and fluid, unlike its ever been on any Xbox console ever before. I think this solves a major pain point for gamers. It almost feels like I'm racing up to keep up with how fast the system is, whereas before, I always felt like I was waiting a little. The only downside is that the UI is 1080P, not native 4K. I don't think you'll really notice that. But if you're sitting close to your TV, it's kind of disappointing on the new system.

And as with every new console, these things are basically PCs, so you can't really start gaming right away. I had to sit through a 5 to 10 minute update, and then I just had to schedule a couple of games like "Red Dead Redemption 2," "Dirt 5," "Yakuza-- Like a Dragon," and wait for them to download. It came at a pretty steady clip over my Wi-Fi at about 100 megabits per second. But even with that great speed, it'll take you around an hour to almost two to get a 75 gigabyte game.

So enough of the table setting. How does this thing actually play games? In a word, spectacularly. "Gears 5," which is optimized for the console, now runs at 60 FPS with a dynamic 4K resolution, both in cutscenes and during the main campaign. And everything just looks fantastic. You can tell that it's running the higher graphics settings you'd see on a PC. So you have better quality textures, and there's also a bit of ray tracing going on with the shadows and the lighting.

So it looks like a transformative leap over the last gen, but it's also still "Gears 5," so it's not a brand new game. It's not going to be the must-have game that people need to buy the system, you know? On the Series X, the game also just loaded very quickly. Stages came up within like 10 seconds, whereas I remember on the One X, it was around 30 seconds or more to get these massive textures in. And that's mainly just from the leap to using an SSD. It's not even optimized for the Velocity Architecture yet.

"Gears 5" also supports 120 FPS performance in the multiplayer mode, and that just felt incredibly smooth and responsive. And that's where I really started to see the need for higher frame rates. By having the screen refresh more quickly, the difference between, you know, pressing buttons and seeing something happen on the screen is dramatically reduced. And I really, really felt that low latency when I was looking down the longshot sniper rifle. Every tweak of the controller just was immediately reflected onscreen. It made me feel like a better player overall.

And one thing I noticed as I was mowing down tons of bad guys in "Gears 5" is that this console is pretty quiet. When it's idling, it's near silent. I have a hard time telling it's on. And even when it's under load, the fan is blowing and hot air is coming out, but I can barely hear it. So that's the advantage of going with a giant fan. It's quiet. It doesn't have to spin as fast as smaller fans.

And one thing that's worth mentioning here, I'm talking about different frame rates of performance. I'll say typically in consoles, we're used to 30 FPS, and not even always a constant 30 FPS. That's pretty much been the standard during the Xbox 360 and Xbox One era of games. It was limiting because people didn't have faster TVs, the GPUs just couldn't pump out pixels fast enough.

With the Xbox One X, we started to see some 60 FPS games come about, but they also couldn't really run at a very high resolution. The difference there is 60 FPS just makes things look smoother and sleeker, and that responsiveness is going to get even faster, similar to the jump to 120 FPS.

60 FPS is something PC gamers have considered pretty much a standard for the past 10 years or more, so it's nice to see consoles kind of getting there and making that the base level of quality for a lot of games. You'll still see some 4K, 30 FPS games, but you know, that's up to the player choice. That's why you'll have multiple graphics settings to choose from.

"Yakuza-- Like a Dragon" also looks fantastic and offers three different performance modes. One is 1080P with 60 FPS performance. Another is 1440P with 60 FPS, which I think is a nice balance between low res and the higher res of 4K. And another is a solid 4K, 30 FPS experience.

Now, here's the thing that I mentioned at the top of this review. I didn't have as many games as I'd like to really stress the system. So the Ubisoft games, "Assassin's Creed Valhalla," "Watch Dogs-- Legion," they're not out yet. And the big first-party title for Microsoft, "Halo Infinite," is delayed until next year. And who knows when we'll actually see that?

So the Achilles heel of this system is just brand new games that really want to make you spend money to upgrade to a new console. Still, Microsoft is upgrading a lot of its existing games, so "Forza Horizon 4" is getting the bump up to 4K, 60. "Sea of Thieves" is also going to be able to play in that up from 30, so that's a major leap for that game.

And even if a game isn't fully optimized for the system, just running off an SSD makes it faster. "Red Dead Redemption 2" loaded a full minute faster on the Series X compared to the One X, although that was still a pretty long load time of around 35 seconds. That game ran at 4K, 30 FPS on the One X, and it's still looks good here, although I'm hoping Rockstar eventually gives us a 60 FPS mode. And I'm hoping for that for a lot of games, to be honest.

Thanks to backwards compatibility, you can also play pretty much every game from the entire Xbox Family. And older games also get automatic HDR added, so that made playing something like "Geometry Wars-- Retro Evolved," an Xbox 360 launch title, transformative on my OLED, because those bright levels and the colors just pop off the screen even more.

I even played a bit of "Alan Wake," Remedy's great game from the 360 era, which relies a lot on darkness and light. And the flashlights and all the lighting of that game just pop off the screen. They look really good. And honestly, I want to play through the whole game now just for this.

And as I tested out multiple games, the one thing that I found super useful is Microsoft's new Quick Resume feature, which lets you easily hop between up to five to six different titles. Not every game supports it, but when you do, if you try to reload a game, you'll see the title screen for a couple of seconds and then you're right back to where you were. This is nice if you're a little indecisive and you just want to move between different titles pretty quickly. It's much better than going back to the Start screen and loading up all the title stuff for every game.

And another thing Microsoft has going for it is Game Pass, which is its subscription service that gives you access to rotating library of games, all their first-party titles, some EA access titles, and soon Bethesda games. So it's not as if Microsoft doesn't have games for people to play. It's just the new stuff, the big draws, just aren't there. I think Game Pass has been a great deal for years and certainly with the Xbox One X and everything.

So now, it's still worth getting. Game Pass Ultimate also gives you Xbox Live multiplayer access for $15 a month. And if you're trying to figure out how to buy one of these consoles, I think Xbox All Access, for $35 a month, you get Game Pass, everything, and the Xbox Series X. That's not a bad deal at all.

Now, when it comes to disappointing bits of this console, yeah, again, not many games. I'm also sad we're not really seeing ray tracing being pushed very hard, aside from "Gears 5," which from what I've read doesn't even fully take advantage of the ray tracing within the AMD GPU. And that's a shame when Sony is out there showing off "Miles Morales" and other games that really use ray tracing to good effect.

Microsoft also isn't saying much more about VR, which is something that probably won't affect many consumers, but hey, I like the stuff. I've reviewed it. And this hardware is certainly powerful to power a decent VR headset. Maybe Microsoft is just waiting for a good wireless headset to give you a sort of Oculus Quest-like experience in your living room. I think that would be a nice upgrade over the PS VR and other living room VR solutions.

And just a quick nod here to the entertainment aspects, yep, the Series X can play 4K Blu-rays and run all the media apps that you want like Netflix and YouTube. I think most people are going to be running those off of their TVs instead, but hey, if you want this stuff, it's there. And as a cinephile, I still like having 4K Blu-ray support. It doesn't feel much faster than the Xbox One X, but it's a nice thing to have, especially when who knows if future consoles will even have disk drives?

So here's the real question about the Xbox Series X. Do you even need one? And that's a tough thing to say because this is a $500 system, and that's a huge investment. I do think for anybody that's somehow managed to survive with the original Xbox One or the One S, this is a massive upgrade. You'll feel the change immediately. And Xbox One X owners, they're probably always going to want to be on the cutting edge. So, you know, they're going to see an investment there.

I'm not sure if Microsoft is really making the sell for new consumers, though, or to really bring over Playstation fans. Also if you don't have a brand new 4K TV, if you have an older set or even a 1080 TV and you're not trying to upgrade anytime soon, I think the Series S is a really good deal for $299. It offers a lot of the same hardware, just not native 4K rendering as much. But you'll be able to play all the same games. You'll have 120 FPS performance if you actually want that. And you'll have a lot of the benefits of the entire Xbox ecosystem. The big downside with that system is that it has a 512 gigabyte drive with only 362 gigabytes of storage, so you're really limited in the amount of games you can plug in there.

At this point, it's hard to compare the Series X to the PlayStation 5 just because we can't quite talk about Sony's console completely. But hey, when it comes to games, Sony is kind of winning. "Spider-man-- Miles Morales" looks fantastic. A lot of people are excited for the "Demon's Souls" remake. And there are other games like the "Devil May Cry 5" special edition, which really takes advantage of ray tracing.

Despite that one major deficiency, though, I do think the Series X is everything I'd want in the next generation console. Its hardware is fast enough for 4K, 60 FPS gaming. It'll get you up to 120 FPS if you want it. There's ray tracing. There's incredibly fast load times. There's a lot of great features for older backwards compatible games. And I do think Game Pass overall is a nice thing to have in any new system because you're not going to be buying as many games.

So yeah, even though Microsoft is a bit flat footed against Sony at launch, I do think the Xbox Series X is going to be a compelling next generation console for a lot of players.

Stay tuned to engadget.com for more of our next generation console news. We'll have a PS5 up review soon. If you dug this review, be sure to like and subscribe.

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