Xbox Series X Review

As hardware this is the strongest box of its generation and it is not especially close. Twelve teraflops of RDNA 2 across 52 compute units, 16 GB of GDDR6 on a split bus, and a vertically stacked tower that pulls air straight up through one 130 mm fan and stays near-silent under full load. Quick Resume holds several suspended games at once and switches between them in seconds, the kind of feature you stop noticing until you use anything else.

The backward compatibility work is the best in the industry: four generations of Xbox software, many titles auto-upgraded to higher resolutions, HDR injected into games made before HDR existed, and FPS Boost doubling framerates on releases nobody will ever patch again. What it lacked for most of its life was a reason unique to itself. Halo Infinite stumbled, Starfield landed mixed, and the flagship pitch quietly became a subscription rather than any single game. Superb engineering, a thinner library, and a console that deserved better software than it got.