The new Xbox One X ($500) is the world’s most powerful gaming console. Putting aside the fact that every next-gen console should be more powerful than its predecessor, it’s hard to dismiss the massive leap forward the One X takes. Its eight-core, 2.3GHz processor, 6-teraFLOP graphics processor and staggering 12GB of RAM place it handily above the Sony PS4 in performance. That kind of horsepower — a 40 percent bump — means the system can handle not only 4K gaming, high dynamic range (HDR) output, and 4K Blu-ray playback, but it will also play games better and faster, even if they’re not specifically engineered to produce at that enhanced level. Of course, games optimized for 4K resolution, whether natively or through updates, are available at the launch of the console next week — FIFA 18, Gears of War 4, etc. — but for the most part, 4K content will trickle out over weeks, months and years, eventually becoming the standard.
The question is, should you throw down $500 to game in 4K?
Committed gamers will, sooner or later. But the new system’s multitude of other benefits still make a pretty compelling case for buying the One X. I paired it up with a 55-inch LG C7P television ($1,800) — a fantastic UHD set with among the best 4K performance in the market — to find out what the real take-home is. After all, 1080p high-def gaming is already pretty damn good. Can our minds truly be blown any further? Turns out, perhaps predictably, of course they can — 4K games will always be better than non-4K, no? — though there are a few qualifications to this assessment.
After trolling through Microsoft’s sometimes confusing list of games that were true 4K, enhanced by the developer to take advantage of One X capability, and HDR-ready—including which titles were available now versus coming soon — I tried Zoo Tycoon, FIFA 18, Gears of War 4, and the freebie World of Tanks, settling on Gears of War 4 for most of my review. (The list of enhanced, 4K, and HDR games numbers about 10 at launch, but goes up into the twenties when you exclude HDR.) All were downloaded with relatively acceptable haste (i.e., a few hours) from the Microsoft store. Fortunately, the store itself highlights the games that are optimized for One X, which helps significantly.
For backward-compatibility situations like this, you’ll find that games run at faster frame rates and higher resolution, the texture filtering automatically comes out better, and everything will load faster thanks to a 50-percent-faster hard disk.
I’d hoped that Forza 7 would be available in 4K from the get-go, but it wasn’t. Nevertheless, I started playing that first, and still found the experience more enthralling than I had on the conventional Xbox One, thanks to the combination of the LG’s own picture enhancements and the One X’s processing boost. For backward-compatibility situations like this, you’ll find that games run at faster frame rates and higher resolution, the texture filtering automatically comes out better, and everything will load faster thanks to a 50-percent-faster hard disk. Truth be told, you’ll still spend plenty of time staring at spinning pinwheels, but it’s a bit less. The day we have instant-on, instant-play will be a magical day indeed.
But once those pinwheels disappear and you’re into a legit One X–enhanced game, the payoff is immense. GoW 4 plays brilliantly fast, with crisp, clear rendering no matter how intense the onscreen action might be. It’s got that you-are-there feel, of course, though still with the current generation of gaming’s general level of detail — that is, the characters still move with the same stiffness and overall “game-like” motion, but you can already see that as 4K becomes the new standard, we’ll very quickly reach the uncanny valley with human renderings and game environments. Everything else about GoW 4 came off exceptionally smoothly, which shouldn’t be surprising given that it’s no longer maxing out its hardware capability. Give it time.
