Xbox head honcho was recently quoted that Microsoft would be releasing another console at some point in the future - an Xbox Two so to speak - "I fully expect that you'll see another console from us," Phil Spencer said. Well that’s hardly news you might think, company that makes games consoles says it will release another games console at some point in the future. However, the gaming market has changed so radically over the last couple of generations that planning for future hardware is an indicator of Microsoft’s mindset going forward.
In brief I’ll be discussing when the Xbox Two is due, what hardware it will have to enable possible 4K and VR gaming and why a new console might come much sooner than we might think.
Xbox Two release date
Before I get into what the Xbox Two will be like, it’s worth pinning down a time frame for its release. Now that’s a little hard to predict as the first Xbox had a surprisingly short lifespan of four years, but then dominant Xbox 360 rolled on for eight years (partly due to a global recession admittedly) before the Xbox One emerged. The PlayStation has had a more stable existence, with six years between each console (seven for the PS3 but again that recession has to be noted). That would put an Xbox Two (and possibly a PS5) around the back end of 2019.
Ahh you may say, but Microsoft said the Xbox One would have a 10-year lifespan! Yes, that’s true but it doesn’t preclude the Xbox Two from launching before the end of the Xbox One’s useful life, the Xbox 360 is still going strong especially in some territories.
One thing I can say for sure is that with Sony currently leading the way in terms of console sales, the ball is certainly in Microsoft’s court. The company mustn’t launch too early, as many will wait to compare the two new consoles, but if it can offer a significant upgrade it has more to gain by ending this console generation first.
| Xbox consoles | PlayStation consoles | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| N/A | N/A | PS1 | 1994 |
| Xbox | 2001 | PS2 | 2000 |
| Xbox 360 | 2005 | PS3 | 2006 |
| Xbox One | 2013 | PS4 | 2013 |
^ The Xbox One may also go on for 10 years, but that doesn't mean an Xbox Two won't come before that
Gaming in the cloud
The reason that Microsoft might not have made another console is that there’s been a lot of talk about gaming moving into the cloud. PlayStation Now lets you stream PS3 games from the cloud to your PS4, while Microsoft and Sony both let you stream games from your console to other devices.
With internet connections improving, the dream would be a small streaming device in your home, with all the expensive, hot and noisy tech kept in a server room far, far away. It should be cheaper, as there wouldn’t be as much hardware sitting around doing nothing most of the time and it would be far more power efficient.
However, at present most people don’t have the bandwidth to get top-quality visuals down their internet connection, and there’s issues with input lag as it sends your buttons presses up to the server. Both of which could become even bigger issues when I look at the next big things in gaming.
4K and VR-enabled
If you need a good internet connection to stream 1080p video at 30fps, then imagine what kind of connection you need to stream something tougher. many games already run at 1080p at 60fps, while PC gamers are already enjoying gaming at 4K (four times the resolution of Full HD), while VR really needs at least 1080p at 90fps to be convincing.
Well, I’ve got 4K Netflix you may think (lucky you), but remember games are not video, a streaming game has to be compressed into video in real-time rather than at the leisure of its creator many months before. Real-time compression simply isn’t as effective, so the stream is far fatter for the same image quality - and gamers like their games to look really sharp.
Gaming may have a cloud element in the future, for demos and games that don’t demand the finest graphics, but local hardware isn’t going to disappear anytime soon.
^ The Oculus is almost with it (so they say) and comes with an Xbox One controller. If VR is a success we will see new consoles sooner rather than later
Disc-less
Presuming then that gaming stays local, an optical drive would certainly be an optional extra for any next-generation console. On the plus side, such drives are now fairly cheap (unlike when the PlayStation 3 launched with its costly Blu-ray drive) and wouldn’t impact overly on the price of a new console retailing at £300-400. However as console prices drop over the lifetime of the device, any component that can be eliminated can make a big difference to the
There’s also a matter of perception, both good and bad. The Xbox One originally tried to divorce ownership of games from the disc they came on. It wasn’t a popular move to say the least, largely because it would have killed the secondhand market overnight. However it did have its advantages, letting you lend games to friends online for example.
Removing the drive would put the new Xbox in line with phones, tablets and other app-store driven devices, but it might again kick up a stink with gamers. Only a promise to seriously lower prices for digital games, or to create a regulated online second-hand market might pacify the masses.
On the other hand by 2018 discs may start looking a little old hat, there will practically be nothing left in most homes that requires a disc, and the vast majority of games already need a decent internet connection to get the most out of them. A games console with a drive might just look a bit fuddy-duddy.
I’d rather be rid of them (though given my consoles are soon to relocated to an AV cupboard, that might just be me) but Microsoft will have to move mountains with publishers and work out how to sell hardware after its decapitated games retail as we know it.
^ Microsoft won't misjudge the mood for DRM this badly again, but sooner or later gaming must surely dump the discs
Graphics hardware
It’s hard to know if there will be a disc drive in the casing, but a processor and powerful graphics hardware look to be a dead cert, if as I suppose local-powered gaming is to continue as it does presently. So just what kind of hardware would be required, by modern standards for the 4K and VR gaming that I might expect.
With 4K TVs plummeting in price this year, a games console capable of providing that level of graphics performance sounds like a good target for the Xbox Two. However in practice that may well be out of reach even for a console being launched in around 3 years time.
At present to consistently produce true 4K visuals at a consistent 30fps on a PC you need to be running the best graphics cards around. The AMD R9 Fury X and GeForce GTX 980 Ti cost around £500 a piece. However if you’re looking for the kind of affordable hardware that might grace a console to be released in late 2019, you need to ignore those and extrapolate just how much would be on offer from a mid-ranged graphics part - as the hardware in the current consoles is roughly similar to the power provided by 2012’s Radeon HD 7770 card.
For starters it’s telling that even today, AMD hasn’t moved on from the 28nm process used on that card. Power for a mid-range card has only increased from around 1800 GFLOPS to 2000 GFLOPS in the last two years. AMD is promising big improvements in both memory bandwidth, with stacked memory, and power efficiency, with 14nm FinFet processes.
Even then I can’t see any console graphics card hitting the whopping 8,600 GFLOPS that the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X can produce today - I’d be impressed if that can hit half that figure in a compact, relatively quiet device that you’d be happy to have in your living room.
| Chipset and Year | GFLOPS and Process | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Radeon HD 4770 | 2009 | 960 | 40nm |
| Radeon HD 5770 | 2009 | 1360 | 40nm |
| Radeon HD 6770 | 2011 | 1360 | 40nm |
| Radeon HD 7770 | 2012 | 1280 | 28nm |
| Radeon R7 260X | 2013 | 1971 | 28nm |
| Radeon R7 370 | 2015 | 2000 | 28nm |
Now obviously a console’s single hardware specification makes it easier to optimise graphics performance above and beyond that of an equivalent PC but even then 4K gaming at 30fps might be beyond most games, and only reserved for titles with less-detailed worlds. A more realistic figure would be 2,560x1,440 at a very steady frame rate. Which could then translate to Full HD at 90fps for VR experiences. After all, everyone thought we'd get Full HD gaming at 60fps for the current generation but the Xbox One in particular has failed to achieve this consistently.
A quick note that AMD hardware would be a near-cert. A key way of making a console cost-efficient is to reduce the number of chips it contains. AMD is able to provide a decent CPU and GPU on the same piece of silicon (which is why both Xbox One and PS4 use this hardware) and I can’t see where else Microsoft would turn for such hardware.
^ Huge watercooled cards like this one will never appear in a living room games console, thankfully
Backwards compatibility
Using AMD hardware and with today’s excellent development tools, it’s likely that any new console would be highly compatible with its predecessor. ON top of that Microsoft has promised that Windows 10 will run and run, allowing for both the Xbox One and Xbox Two to run on the same operating system. That opens up a number of possibilities, the most exciting of which could mean a much earlier than expected release for the new hardware.
Console hardware has traditionally been expensive to develop and launch, with the profits coming later down the road once the installed user base gets big enough. However, what if you could launch a second, more powerful, console while the current one continued to rake in the cash and create a two-tier system of hardware releases.
This would have been impossible before, as it would divide development for the two platforms. But with better tools and a more PC-like approach to development, along with easy patching of older games online, Microsoft could release the Xbox Two with full cross compatibility with the Xbox One and continue to release games that run on both, but with better graphics on the newer console.
The Xbox Two will be …
So what have we got. A new piece of console hardware launching in late 2019, so you should start hearing a lot about it from early 2018. it will use AMD hardware capable of smooth VR gaming and supporting 4K resolutions but likely running at a native 2,560x1,440 at 30 or 60fps. It will run Windows 10 and have complete backwards compatibility. I’m not so sure about a disc drive and physical media - if I had to choose I’d say no, but it’s a huge step for the games industry, which lags behind in the area of digital distribution.
We'll be updating this article as new details emerge.
