Xbox One Console Reviews
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Xbox One X: What It Takes to Build a Console
Peanut butter and jelly. Shaq and Kobe. Master Chief and Cortana. If there’s anything we’ve learned during our short time on this planet, it’s that collaboration is the driving force of creation (and tasty sandwiches).
We recently heard from Bryan Sparks, Senior Designer, Microsoft Device Design Team, and Leonardo Del Castillo, GM of Xbox Devices Console Development to learn about their creative collaboration process behind the world’s most powerful gaming console: Xbox One X.
To hear them tell it, the story is a fascinating one. In that, the engineering and design teams executed on the development of Xbox One X with a clear and specific goal from the outset — deliver True 4K Gaming in a small form factor design — and endeavored to work together to make that dream possible without compromising on their vision. And the end result is tremendous.
Kickstarting the Process
As you might imagine when one sits down to create the world’s most powerful gaming console, the engineering and design teams would face a lot of questions: How do you make the systems work with each other? How can we make it compact? What’s the expression of Xbox One X? How does it tell a story just by the way it looks?
While these were all great questions the team looked to tackle early on, the most critical that they all agreed to land on was that this was going to be “True 4K Gaming” at its heart, and this is what was going to drive the architecture of the system.
The Scorpio Engine is designed, at its core, to be the most powerful system-on-a-chip for game consoles that has ever been created. Everything about it was designed to be compatible with Xbox One (and Xbox One S). And to make that happen, it was clear that nearly every component that was to be housed in the system was going to have to be custom built. That left the team with a lot of freedom of how it could design the system around things like optical drives, hard drives, and memory components.
“If you start with a bag of parts, how does that turn into a product?” explains Del Castillo. “We needed a direction, and floor planning directions, to lead the architecture around what the motherboard will look like, what will the chassis look like. And for that you lean on the design team.”
The Design of a System
“Whenever you start a new design project, it’s this blank canvas and you start feeding ideas and constraints,” explains Sparks. “Eventually, you see this thing start to form as you work through the process.”
When creating the design of the system, the team knew all those parts had to come together in one cohesive unit. They knew it was going to be part of the growing Xbox One family of devices, and wanted to take all the feedback received on the design of Xbox One S that the community loved.
“The other part of our vision is what would embody this product,” Sparks continued. “We envisioned this monolith (“2001: A Space Odyssey”). Whenever you see it in the film, it was a signal to the audience that it was the next phase of advancement. So, we kept that as a design goal: Xbox One X is the next point of advancement.”
“We did not want Xbox One X to be any larger than Xbox One S, which was a huge ask as we were putting 40% more power into it. And this is where we knew we had to work with Leo and the engineers to make that happen.”
Fitting into Place
As the engineering team continued to look at the overall intent of the design, for which there was a lot of collaboration between the two teams, they begun to lay out the components like the motherboard, and determined how memory would route to the system and be arranged. The iteration continued to the point where they found it would make the most sense to have the motherboard fit on the “ceiling” of the console, and placing the optical drive and hard drive on top of one other to create the optimum stacking height of the system.
The other benefit of having the motherboard on the ceiling is that there would not need to be any venting on the top space of the console, keeping the clean, monolithic form the design team was looking to achieve.
The other intent was to ensure the power supply would live internally, just like Xbox One S — it’s not much larger, but it is nearly 40% more powerful. To continue with the efficient design (getting these parts into a small form factor) they placed the power right behind the optical drive. In turn, this allowed them to keep all the ports on the back of the system in nearly same place as Xbox One S so that when you’re upgrading to Xbox One X, set up would be as simple, yet familiar, as possible.
Keeping Cool
With so many components, and with a system nearly twice as powerful as Xbox One S, there’s sure to be a lot of heat moving through the chassis that needs to be exhausted. This was initially tackled where a heat sink would work as a base with a radiator, and then with a stacked fan on top of it. The problem with that approach is it created a lot of added height to the system.
“When you’re trying to scale that amount of power into the Scorpio engine, it wasn’t going to be a feasible approach to achieve the size we wanted to do,” says Leo. “We got innovative and looked at other tech we could use and created a vapor chamber heat sink, like what you’d find in high-end PCs and graphic cards, and we believe this is the first time it’s being used in a consumer electronic.”
The vaper chamber heat sink is fascinating. It’s hollow, filled with water, and there’s a vacuum that draws upon that water to help move the heat to the radiator fins and thus into the air. Leo’s team looked like they solved how to keep temperatures lower than normal, but there still needs way for that air to move through and out of the system.
The result is a custom centrifugal fan assembly with ducts and propellers that are custom built just for Xbox One X. This helps move air out of the system and keep all the components cool, including the power supply. In fact, the team built the fan assembly in a virtual space and ran empirical models to continue refining the design, helping to pinpoint any “hot spots” in the console’s components before laying down the silicone needed to create the fan housing.
The team had found a solution to move air out of the system — but how would the design bring air in to Xbox One X?
“This is where concurrent engineering comes into play,” explains Sparks. “We’re working back and forth between the functional realities of the engineering process and the design intent. And this is where we get to play off each other.”
Part of this play was figuring out which components were prioritized to get access to the air flow first, and that came back to the Xbox One S design, with its short-side venting detail to allow air into the console box. But the design team wanted to figure out how to upgrade that expression from the bold hole pattern from Xbox One S.
“Where we landed was grabbing the vent pattern from Xbox One S and miniaturizing it as much as we could to where it was just barely manufacturable. Which was no easy ask. It was another thing we had to innovate,” says Sparks.
And to do just that, the engineering team realized they would have to create a new tool to answer the growing number of asks from the design team: 5-sided unibody with a top-housing, zero draft, thousands of tiny pins to make the perforation pattern, and super thin walls.
“But we were able to do it! Probably making the most innovative and complex injection molding tool we have ever made,” proclaims Sparks. “We did all of this to give the outside appearance of this console the same level of precision of the work we’ve been putting into the inside.”
Putting it All Together
The guts for Xbox One X are all placed on the table, making it hard to imagine how these will snap into the small form factor of Xbox One X. Leo picks up each piece one at a time and easily starts to put it all together, like some sort of awesome jigsaw puzzle, continuing to talk through and explain the logic behind the layout of the components in such a snug form-fitting design. Even when placing the hard drive into the system, Leo takes the time to explain how such a basic component has also received some special attention.
“As for the hard drive, the mechanical components are pretty much standard,” explains Leo. “We do work with our manufactures to optimize firmware performance specifically for our product. To preserve that performance, we have to take a great deal of care when it’s mounted.”
To solve for this the team created a custom mount for the drive to dampen the vibrations that would be carried through the chassis, as too much vibration would compromise the performance of the drive itself. Especially since the optical drive and hard drive will be living on top of each other inside the system.
Leo then grabs the fan assembly and fits it snug over the vaper chamber heat sink, the power supply drops in above the motherboard, and the ducts from the assembly all naturally snap right into place.
“Every single component and where it’s placed is critical,” explains Leo. “Start moving holes around or components, even a millimeter, it can cause interference to other products. So, it’s necessary for the engineers to be working on the design concurrently. There’s no staging like, ‘First we design a motherboard, then we’ll design a chassis around the motherboard…’ If we did that we’d wind up with a sub-optimal product.”
The Finishing Touch
“For Xbox One S we developed a brand-new color called Robot White and that did a great job of embodying what Xbox One S was, which was a bold, approachable console,” explains Sparks. “For Xbox One X, we had a different goal in mind. We wanted a color that would embody the power that was encased inside this console.”
Interestingly, after all the combinations of color to design, Sparks and his team landed back on black, specifically Infinite Black, finding that a deep, rich, neutral black was a color that worked well with the simple design of Xbox One X.
However, since the design of Xbox One X is between two separate housings, and not wanting to lose the slight shift or overhang, Sparks and his team felt the housing design could get lost being all the same color.
“What we did was, create a fine top housing texture that almost looks like it’s painted, and on the bottom housing we pushed on a heavy texture, so the final part looks really, really, matte,” says Sparks.
The effect is very noticeable as you look at the console in different shades of light and how it seems to move elegantly around the system, refracting differently to help draw attention to the top and bottom housings of the system. There’s also a bit of an inspiration from the Xbox Elite Wireless Controller as well, bringing some of the textured grip from those controllers to the base of the unit.
And if there was a one more thing moment to be had, it was showcasing Xbox One X in its vertical form, harkening back to that original design intent goal of a monolith, calling to this as the next moment in the story of Xbox.
“All these details, and this work, and all this refinement lead us down the track of creating, in my opinion, the best console we have ever made,” says Sparks. “We didn’t build this for us; we built this for the gamer. The gamer wins in this scenario. They get the best console we could possibly create.”
https://news.xbox.com/2017/10/05/xbox-one-x-what-it-takes-to-build-a-console/
Star wars looks amazing
Eh, probably unlikely. To be real I don't game much and I only got the one a few months ago.
Opinion: Star Wars: Battlefront 2 Beta Raises Pay-To-Win Fears
I’ve been playing the Star Wars: Battlefront 2 beta for the last couple of days, and while I’m enjoying shooting blasters and dogfighting in TIE Fighters, its progression and upgrade card system seriously rub me the wrong way.
Like so many other games nowadays, Battlefront 2 has loot boxes called ‘crates’ that contain digital goodies like new weapons, ability upgrades, weapon mods, and passive stat bonuses that give you an edge, along with a range of cosmetic options like hero skins and victory poses. You get crates either by earning in-game credits to buy them, or by spending real money to purchase them outright.
So this begs the obvious question: Is Star Wars: Battlefront 2 pay-to-win?
Well, it’s a plain and simple fact that spending money in this game can give you an immediate advantage in actual matches, especially in the early days before people who aren’t spending have had time to earn in-game currency. It’s true that you might luck into good items in your first earned crates, but buying more chances means your odds of striking gold go up.
So if I spend $200 on crates, open or craft all the best cards I can, then face an equally skilled opponent at the same level as me who didn’t spend money, I will likely win because I have better tools available. That’s indisputable, which means Battlefront 2 at least has pay-to-win elements. Frankly, that sucks, and would potentially be the kiss of death for any competitive shooter that wasn’t wielding the Star Wars license.
To be fair, you can’t buy your way to maximum capacity, at least: Leveling up a class through playing matches will unlock more card slots for it, so investing time can also give you a leg up. But those level ups seem to be coming much faster than the crates, at least in the beta.
[Update: It's been pointed out to me that leveling classes is actually tied to how many cards you have for that class, not matches played, which makes this even worse. This means that buying large amounts of cards right off the bat will allow you to immediately equip more cards per class than those who don't, so you actually can buy your way to maximum capacity.]
Also, the new weapons and ability replacements you unlock aren’t strictly “better” than the default stuff in pure power, often giving you varied options instead of straight power. The issue is that if I prefer to play a certain style, such as sniping with a high-powered, low rate-of-fire rifle, and I don’t have the option but my opponent has a gun that suits his style, I’m at a disadvantage because I’m out of my element. That’s a question of player skill, though, but the buff cards are objectively purchased power, granting passive skills like healing after kills or lowering ability cooldowns.
Even worse, those buffs have four levels of quality, which increase in power and rarity as they improve. There’s a TIE Fighter/X-wing card that just flat-out makes your primary fire stronger, and while its base level is only a 2% increase, the fourth is a much more significant 10%. One of Boba Fett’s cards makes him totally immune to damage while firing his rockets midair, but only at fourth level. Effects like this aren’t uncommon, with other passive stat increases prevalent throughout the cards EA has shown so far.
And you can spend a crafting resource (also found in crates) to upgrade weaker versions of those cards, the crafting cost going up as the quality does. This means that players who purchase crates not only have more chances to find the rarer (and objectively stronger) cards, they also get more resources to upgrade the weaker cards they find into the powerful versions.
What makes this even stranger to me is that this is the only major competitive game I can think of that has mixed cosmetic and stat-boosting items in the same crate to this extent. Unless there are systems behind the scenes that guarantee you’ll get a certain amount of upgrade cards, you could potentially feel cheated out of the good stuff by a slew of uninteresting cosmetics like victory poses.
The truth of the matter is that we don’t know what the balance of all these things will look like yet. The beta is very clear to say the current drop rates aren’t representative of what they will look like at launch, and there is a world where crates and high-quality cards come so easily that spending money really isn’t necessary.
http://www.ign.com/articles/2017/10/07/opinion-star-wars-battlefront-2-beta-raises-pay-to-win-fears
Speedrunner Beats Every Cuphead Boss Using DDR Pads
Why fight demonic animations with a mouse and keyboard or game controller when you can just dance all those troubles away instead?
Alright, so speedrunner PeekingBoo doesn’t exactly defeat Goopy Le Grande or Captain Brineybeard by dancing per se, but he does do it by stomping—patiently, methodically—until each is dead. You see PeekingBoo isn’t your average, run-of-the-mill speedrunner. He’s finished a lot of games quickly, and even set respectable records in a number of them, but his true calling card is beating games while hitched to a Dance Dance Revolution arcade cabinet. He plays them on a PC that’s connected to the DDR machine with the pad buttons programmed for the particular keyboard inputs of whatever game is being attempted.
When Cuphead came out then it proved an irresistible next target for PeekingBoo’s unique skills. “Cuphead has been making the rounds lately because of how players have reacted when faced with a difficult challenge, I aimed to shed some light on the argument to see whether the game lived up to the hype by seeing if I could beat it casually with Dance Pads,” he said in an email. “After doing so in around 6-hours I decided to kick it up a notch.”
That’s ultimately what led to the 1:24:40 run above. In the Cuphead speedrunning category of All Bosses, solo and on regular difficulty, PeekingBoo is currently 16th out of twenty. “Speedrunning the game combines the stress of waiting for the right moment to attack with the amount of time that gets lost in a run if you die at the very end of a fight, having to do it all again,” he said.
“In order to do any action I pretty much have to sacrifice all of my others, so to dodge attacks I can’t jump or shoot. To switch weapons I have to press a switch on the arcade cabinet itself. The whole setup for play relies on having the best weapon selected before starting a stage and having a lot of foresight for the upcoming attacks to allow enough time to react.”
Doctor Kahl’s Robot proved especially hard given how long the bullet hell phases go on. Like all of the others, however, he too eventually fell.
While the conversation surrounding Cuphead’s difficulty has probably hyped it up to a point over and above what it actually is (the game is challenging but not so much that you should be afraid of trying it or anything) using DDR pads is just a whole other level. Of course, it would be somewhat more shocking of if this were PeekingBoo’s first rodeo, but it’s not. He’s submitted speedrun records for a bunch of other well known games, all of them completed under similar idiosyncratic conditions. His two hour, eleven minute completion of Super Mario Sunshine is particularly aw inspiring.
Not surprisingly, PeekingBoo’s obsession started out as an idle distraction. “I bought the machine nearly a decade ago when I was really into rhythm games,” he said. “Kinda just got bored of regular DDR over the years and naturally progressed over to playing games in general as a bit of a joke.” It turned out to be a rewarding challenge in the long run though so he’s been doing it ever since.
Before he moves on to his next game, PeekingBoo hopes to get his personal best Cuphead time down to under an hour.
https://kotaku.com/speedrunner-beats-every-cuphead-boss-using-ddr-pads-1819251561
excited to see it tho
na not til I’m serious about getting a 4k projector or 75” TV...I watch movies and shit far more than I game...1080 is good enough for me for now
spoiler?
I lost a friend in high school behind that shit...dude was egyptian...swore he was white on top of that argued that egyptians weren’t african...let him borrow one of my pop’s books...gave it back to me a week later...acknowledged he was wrong...never spoke to me after that lmao
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Its 2017 not 35 Ad. No one bickering back and forth was alive back in that time.
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I dunno but I only rock with Sony or Samsung. I've tried the LG OLED but I wasn't a fan of the quality but I was happier with Sony.
So u liked the Flagship A1 vs any of the Lg series as far as sports and a movie or 2?
Honestly I really wanted the LG like badly and when I took it home and dove into the settings I wasn't getting the look I always go for with movies, games and sports. Took it back 2 days later and copped the Sony again and I did my set up and was blown away by the quality and color display. For gaming, movies and sports. I like Samsung but Sony has that "It" factor for me.
Did u at least try and let it warm up like 12 hours? That's what the dudes at different spots said whatever brand u go with let it warm up for a bit.
I take it ur gonna mount the sony on the wall?
Oh yeah I had it running for a while watching different type of content. I had pick it up around 11ish at Best Buy so by time i got to the night time it's was well over 12 hrs and I know at night it has a different look too. I have wall mounts so it just pop the brackets on the tv on and off.
Cool. Are u doing the 65 or 55? I watched a breh whose a major home theater guy on youtube. I'll post the vid when i get home from work. The breh i speak of has the Sony A1 65in. He talked about having the LG c series joint and he took it back.
So no ones gonna say it?
The Xbox One X looks like a PS4 Pro
The Xbox One X looks like a PS4 Pro
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