One year on from the release of the PlayStation 4 Pro, the fortunes of Sony's 'supercharged' console have varied. While titles like Gran Turismo Sport and Horizon Zero Dawn have demonstrated just how well console titles can scale to 4K HDR displays, too many games are delivering lacklustre results that only offer a smaller, more incremental upgrade over the base PS4 experience. Now it's Microsoft's turn, with the new Xbox One X offering more of a brute force approach to tackling the 4K challenge.
The rationale behind the Xbox One X's hardware specification is simple: if ultra HD resolution uses four times as many pixels as standard 1080p, why not make the graphics hardware in the new box four times more powerful than the existing base console? And in a world where the PC versions of multi-platform titles can eat up eight gigs of VRAM owing to their higher resolution artwork aimed at 4K displays, why not bump up the memory provision of the new machine to a massive 12GB of GDDR5?
Is it a strategy that hands in more consistent results than we've seen over the last year on PlayStation 4 Pro? The early evidence looks positive but certainly in terms of the scope of this review, the jury is still out. While we've had a generous amount of time with the Xbox One X hardware, the fact is that high-profile X-enhanced titles available for us to test during the review period have been disappointingly thin on the ground. Gears of War 4 amounts to the only triple-A first party game we had any decent amount of time with, while third party titles have been slow to appear. On top of that, Microsoft's masterstroke in providing free 4K enhanced versions of Xbox 360 titles is another fascinating aspect of the offering we've barely had a chance to look at - Halo 3, Fallout 3 and Oblivion receiving updates just a couple of days away from the review embargo.
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