Global Hardware 1 June 2019

[Bofferbrauer2]

EricHiggin said:

COKTOE said:

That's an interesting thought. Things couldn't realistically get much worse for Xbox, so you may be right.

The downside to that scenario is that the X-Box would have had to, especially if it dropped in 2019, ride out the rest of the gen with a wildly inferior platform to the PS4-Pro, and they were already fairing poorly in direct comparisons to the original PS4. It's possible sales, and the brand may have suffered even more in skipping the X.

A 2018 or 2019 'XB2' would have been extremely tough to get a decent SSD in there in terms of speed and size, along with PCIe 4.0 or whatever recent/future tech they're using to achieve these loading speeds they are promising. Not to mention it would also almost certainly lack ray tracing. You can imagine PS would probably try to move up their schedule a bit in a 2018 scenario, but they could wait a year if it was launched in 2019 instead. PS having a bigger, faster storage solution, PCIe 4.0, and ray tracing, would be a marketing nuke against MS. The cost for XB to try and come close to the tech and specs PS5 would have, would cost way more than $500 if launched by now or soon. It could have led to another Dreamcast scenario.

I agree on 2018, but 2019 could have been possible. The main difference probably would have been the version of Navi GPU(without hardware Raytracing in a 2019 case) and Ryzen CPU(Zen 2 instead of potentially Zen 3).

PCIe 4.0 is certainly not used in a console yet (too expensive and consuming, and doubly so for hardware which supports it), the SSD might potentially be smaller (we have to see if PS5/Scarlett really use an SSD as storage or just as a buffer for the HDD) - and it would have been more expensive.

In other words, no Dreamcast scenario - more like a mix of 360 (launching one year early, giving itself a head start) and XBO (somewhat underpowered compared to the competition, but not excessively so).