The Xbox One X brings smooth 4K gaming to console gamers in the slickest of packages. But for £450 and with so few compelling exclusives, it's a tough sell
By MARK WALTON
Friday 3 November 2017
PROS
Sharp design; powerful hardware; supported 4K HDR games look stunning
CONS
Expensive; lacks compelling exclusives; few enhanced games available at launch
PRICE
£450
7 / 10
Mark Walton
The Xbox One X is a marvel of minituratisation. Its slender frame, no bigger than the already svelte Xbox One S, houses enough computational horsepower to render games in High Dynamic Range (HDR) at a native 4K resolution — that's four times the pixels of a standard full HD 1080p image. Many dedicated gaming PCs struggle to do the same.
The processor, designed by a resurgent AMD, has six teraflops of processing power — compared to 4.2 in the PlayStation 4 Pro and just 1.4 in the Xbox One S — and is paired with 12GB of super-fast GDDR5 memory. That's as much as the most expensive of graphics cards for the PC. In terms of raw specs, the Xbox One X is unbeatable.
Somehow, it's quieter than the competition too. Even when playing graphically intensive games like Gears of War 4 in 4K, the Xbox One X sounds a soft hum instead of a distracting high-pitched whine (a victory for its new vapour chamber cooling system).
Everything from the pleasingly straightforward monolithic case — which is just at home standing vertically as it is lying horizontally — to the inclusion of an infrared receiver for integration into complex home cinema setups has been designed with the no-compromises gamer in mind. And make no mistake, at £450 the Xbox One X isn't a console for the everyday gamer.
You're going to need a 4K TV
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Whether the Xbox One X is for you depends on what it's plugged into. Graphical improvements are most visible on a 4K UHD Premium TV. Unlike the PS4 Pro, which is forced to use a range of clever upscaling techniques to create a 4K image, the Xbox One X can (in some games at least) render a 4K image directly, pixel for pixel.
Theoretically, those games should look sharper, but in practice it's tough to tell the difference between the two consoles unless you compare them side-by-side with your face mere inches away from the screen.
XBOX ONE X VS PS4 PRO SPECS COMPARISON
PROCESSOR
Xbox One X: 8-core CPU at 2.3GHz | PS4 Pro: 8-core CPU at 2.1GHz
GRAPHICS
Xbox One X: AMD graphics with 6 teraflops | PS4 Pro: AMD graphics with 4.2 teraflops
MEMORY
Xbox One X: 12GB GDDR5 | PS4 Pro: 8GB GDDR5
STORAGE
Xbox One X: 1 terabyte | PS4 Pro: 1 terabyte
OPTICAL DRIVE
Xbox One X: 4K Blu-ray drive | PS4 Pro: Blu-ray/DVD
PRICE
Xbox One X: £449 | PS4 Pro: £349
READ MORE
Read our in-depth Xbox One X vs PS4 Pro comparison for more detail
More noticeable is the improved frame rate. While affluent PC players have been enjoying greater than 60 frames-per-second gaming for years, even at 4K, consoles have been mostly limited to 30FPS, regardless of resolution. While not every game on the Xbox One X runs in 4K at 60FPS, those that do — including the excellent Forza 7 — both look and feel fantastic.
The PS4 Pro makes you choose between a high frame rate responsiveness and sharper visuals; the Xbox One X lets you have both.
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The Xbox One X has a pleasingly simple design.
Mark Walton
Those that want even greater responsiveness can opt to run certain games with an uncapped frame rate that rises above 60FPS. This produces screen tearing on a regular TV (where an unsightly line appears to break up the image), but the Xbox One X also supports Freesync, an AMD technology where the refresh rate of the display is syncronised with the frame rate of the game. Using Freesync results in an incredibly smooth gaming experience, albeit one that is limited to a subset of dedicated PC displays, rather than commercially available TVs.
Unfortunately, few games take advantage of the Xbox One X hardware at launch — and those that do are wildly inconsistent in terms of features. Some, like Gears of War 4, allow you to switch between native 4K rendering with all the graphical settings turned up or a 60FPS second mode running at a lower resolution.
Rise of the Tomb Raider goes further with native 4K, upscaled 4K with more graphical effects, or 1080p with an uncapped frame rate. Others, like Super Lucky's Tale don't have any user-configurable settings at all, despite the inclusion of Xbox One X enhancements.
Having access to such settings is as much a requirement for those with 1080p TVs as it is for those with 4K TVs. By taking advantage of super-sampling (where a 4K image is rendered down to 1080p), the Xbox One X can output surprisingly sharp visuals on a standard HDTV. There's a noticeable difference in clarity between a super-sampled Xbox One X game and the same game running on an Xbox One S, although it's questionable whether that alone is enough to justify an upgrade.
But where are the games?
The high frame rate is a greater draw, but with so few games enhanced for launch (even recent releases like Assassin's Creed Origins and Shadow of War are listed as "in development") and with so few details on exactly what is supported in each game, I can't recommend rushing out to buy an Xbox One X just yet.
Using a high-end 4K HDR display like the Dell UP2718Qis the best way to play games on Xbox One X.
Mark Walton
The lack of Xbox One X enhanced games at launch mirrors the lack of compelling games on the Xbox One as a whole. When it all comes together — when HDR makes games as bright and as colourful as developers imagined them, when 4K resolution makes them pin sharp, when high frame rates make them wonderfully responsive — the Xbox One X is without doubt the best place to play. It has the power of the PC with little of the faff and killer controller. Even the user interface, once one of the most frustrating to use on a consumer device, has been pleasingly overhauled to be faster and to put games front and center.
But there are so few games on the Xbox One I actually want to play. Sony's recent press conference in Paris had its problems, but the ambition and quality of the games it showcased was never in doubt. The Last of Us 2, Spider-Man, God of War, Detroit: Become Human — these are games that sell systems. As good as Forza 7 is, the Xbox One doesn't yet have a single exclusive killer app, let alone enough to fill a press conference.
The Xbox One X is what the Xbox One should have been at launch: a well-designed practical console that, like the Xbox 360 before it, makes a generational leap in graphics. If it had been, perhaps Microsoft wouldn't find itself in the situation it's in now: a games company with a brilliant bit of hardware and so very little to play on it.
