The Xbox One launched last November but there are some of us that are already looking for signs of the next Xbox. The Xbox One has been confirmed for a ten year lifespan, which means Microsoft is committed to supporting the console entirely with software updates and games during that period. What a lot of less-informed fans and even professional writers/editors are assuming is that Microsoft won’t have another console to talk about until the end of that ten-year span. But there are several facts that should be considered when looking at the release cycle for the Xbox going forward.
The Xbox One Is Already 3 Years Old – Don’t call me crazy, this is pretty accurate. GDDR3 and your standard DDR3 memory have been widely available and affordable for a few years now. While SDDR3 memory is still a go-to memory standard found in all low and high-budget machines, GDDR3 is only found in low-end graphics chips that typically retail for $60-$90 while GDDR5 is found in basically all mid-high level GPUs. Microsoft’s Xbox One console doesn’t opt for the GDDR5 that Sony went for but instead went with GDDR3 with the eSRAM module that can handle a maximum of 32MB of data at a time. Microsoft were likely trying to make the console as cheap as they could without drastically sacrificing performance so that they didn’t lose money on each console, something that could indicate that the company doesn’t intend to champion the Xbox One as the best you can get for a full ten years as graphics technologies will be extremely advanced well before 2020.
New Graphical Technologies Are Already Surfacing – Something called “tracing” is rearing its head in the graphics space and is a technology that greatly advances things like lighting effects in real time that currently would take a few Xbox Ones to power (or so we’ve been told). This comes straight from the mouths of Microsoft’s software engineers who are trying to tie in these new graphics technologies into first-party games but have to get creative since the hardware currently isn’t quite up to snuff to outright run the games. Platforms like DirectX 12 will boost the available resources of the Xbox One by bringing the software and hardware operations closer than ever before, but that doesn’t offer the kind of upgrade that would radically drive the Xbox One to the point where 1080p & 60FPS will be standard with every title regardless of complexity or size. Even deactivating the Kinect sensor to open up an additional 10% power for the Xbox One’s GPU is only going to get the Xbox One to the point where more games can achieve 1080p. In cases like Bungie’s upcoming Destiny game 1080p will likely be achieved yet the smoothness of 60 frames per second will be deducted to 30 to reduce stress on the graphics platform. A reasonable trade off, but one that shows that the hardware is not up to snuff to hold out for another 9 1/2 years while greater technology comes rolling out.
Hardware Refreshes Are Practiced Company-Wide – Microsoft’s newly-acquired Nokia division that supports hardware like the Lumia brand are seeing product refreshes every year. The same can be said about the Surface tablets, to which the Pro line of the tablet has already seen its third revision in under two years. Just like all things hardware in the computing industry, Microsoft will likely move to a refresh cycle that brings in a new console well before the previous generation is retired from support. Should that be the case, we’re probably talking a five-year release cycle. Previously, this would be tougher to do since consoles seemingly danced between hardware configurations like x86 CPUs, PowerPC, cell processors, etc. that made it tougher to move onto new hardware without poaching your previous generation console since backwards compatibility could be tricky or non-existent at times. Now, the Xbox One runs the same CPU base that the first Xbox ran on (x86) which is also the same core technology that AMD and Intel use in their desktop/laptop processors. These are widely used and can be lower cost when purchased in bulk, which consoles hardware always is, making it easier to transition from generation to generation.
A five-year rolling console refresh would be the smartest way to proceed at this point if Microsoft wish to support their Xbox One console. Five years is enough time for the product to come down in price without falling so far behind in technology that it becomes insulting to experience games on antiquated hardware. Five years is a long time to go without refreshing your PC, why would gamers adopting consoles feel any better about it? Games can be released on simultaneously on the Xbox One and its successor since they would run the same core technology and developers would merely scale back their graphical or processing detail to make sure the game runs tight on the One while its successor would be able to allow gamers to enjoy the technology that game companies are actively rolling out.
The Xbox 360 to Xbox One hardware jump was minor compared to what we got when we went from the Xbox to the Xbox 360. The One offers roughly 8x more power than the 360 does but it comes eight years after the 360. Microsoft opted to run this hardware because they wanted to run with the One and the Kinect in the same box and likely accepted slightly lesser hardware as a result. Had Microsoft decided to omit the Kinect from the same package from the get-go then perhaps Microsoft could have opted to run a $449 package with stronger hardware, but that wouldn’t be as necessary if they intend to update the hardware well before that ten-year support period ends for the Xbox One, which should be expected without hesitation since the 360 is still being supported until the end of 2015 (most likely). With gaming already on the verge of pushing to 4K resolutions with games like Star Citizen, the Xbox One, Wii U and PlayStation 4 all stand to look pretty weak by 2015 or 2016. Games like Halo 5: Guardians will likely keep gamers satisfied with the performance of the XB1 into 2016, but because we’re using x86 architecture instead of PowerPC, there’s a good chance that developers will learn how to squeeze every ounce of power out of the console much quicker than they did with the 360.
Xbox One Game Source 