Xbox One: From Specs To Backlash!

Courtesy of www.digitaltrends.com

For those of us who were unfortunate enough to miss the release of Microsoft’s hammer that’ll combat the PS4 and WiiU, you didn’t miss much. However what you need to know is what the system’s specs are, and why people are so pissed at Microsoft right now.

Originally the Xbox One had many policies the fan community didn’t agree with. However, after much backlash from the fan community; Microsoft went back on many of their policies. First, there will be no fee required to play used games, and people will be able to buy used games and sell their games as they please. There will be no constant Internet connection to play games, except for an initial one time when you install a game. There will be no region locking and no disk authentication, however because games still give the option to install, if a friend installs a game onto your system that you wish to continue playing, you can buy and download it to your console for the general price (as installing only helps to speed up loading times and reduce wear and tear on the disk, and doesn’t actually install the full game onto your system.) The Kinect no longer needs to be on in order to play the console. So even with the policy reversals and its negative past, do you think that the Xbox One has a chance to take on the PS4? Or has the 8th generation console war already been decided?

Here are the specs of the XBOX ONE! The Xbox One has an APU (accelerated process unit) with eight x86-64 cores, 8 GB of DDR3 RAM with a memory bandwidth of 68.3 GB/s, a 500 GB (Gigabyte) non-replaceable hard drive, and a Blu-ray Disc optical drive. 3 GB of RAM will be reserved for the operating system and apps, leaving 5 GB for games. The graphics processing unit (GPU) is based on an AMD GCN architecture with 12 compute units, which have a total of 768 cores, providing an estimated peak theoretical power of 1.23 TFLOPS (Tera FLoating-point Operations Per Second). The system supports 4K resolution (3840×2160) video output and 7.1 surround sound. The controller looks very similar except for a few things: An actual D-Pad (four buttons instead of the one button with the D-Pad design), a slimmer battery pack, menu and view buttons replace start and back, and “impulse triggers” vibration rotors connected to each trigger to react to the use of the triggers (E.X. when you pull the Right Trigger to fire a gun, that trigger will cause that part of the controller to vibrate in response to the firing of said gun as well as both

Courtesy of www.businessinsider.com

vibrating to the reaction of an incoming hit). The Kinect makes a return, unfortunately, the new Kinect uses a 1080p wide-angle time-of-flight camera (in comparison to the VGA [Video Graphics Array] resolution of the previous version), and processes 2 gigabits of data per second to read its environment. The new Kinect has greater accuracy over its predecessor, can track up to 6 skeletons at once, perform heart rate tracking, and track gestures performed with an Xbox One controller. The Kinect microphone will remain active at all times so it can receive voice commands from the user when needed, even when the console is in sleep mode (so it can be woken back up with a command).

Microsoft is labeling it as an “all-in-one entertainment system” for a few reasons. One, it has the ability to multitask apps, such as Skype, while playing a game, or watching a film. It also has the ability to watch TV and use Kinect voice controls to change the channel. The system also includes a built-in digital video recorder (“Let’s Play” makers rejoice!), however it will not be able to record cable TV, satellite TV, over the air TV, ECT at launch. Microsoft will be reaching out to “the TV guys” in order to obtain DVR recording and playback.