 Alright, before I get into this video I gotta remind you of a couple giveaways we have going now. One is for an Xbox Series X, a PlayStation 5, or a Nintendo Switch. The other is for two copies of Pikmin 3 Deluxe. If you would like a chance to win these, go down into the description. You can comment on this video, like this video, subscribe to the channel, hit that bell icon. A whole bunch of stuff. Go down in there, check it out, and I wish all of you guys luck. So today, Microsoft left the embargo on the Xbox Series X. Now the big thing is that media members even have an Xbox Series X, they currently do not have a PlayStation 5. The PlayStation 5 releases in 6 weeks, so does the Series X. Little strange, but it is what it is, maybe we'll touch on that later. But Microsoft has lifted it and allowed them to talk about backwards compatibility, allowed them to talk about load times, and throughout this video you are going to see footage from Digital Foundry. Full credit to Digital Foundry for all of these frame rate things, I am going to link their full 20 plus minute video they have on all of this that goes into much, much greater detail. Huge credit to them, Digital Foundry does a great job with a lot of these comparisons in talking about the technical aspects of these platforms and games. So what I want to point out in looking at all of this is that the Series X does a bunch of things that nobody else is doing. One, it is backwards compatible, backwards compatible, all the way back to the original Xbox. Xbox, Xbox 360, and Xbox One are all backwards compatible, so it can play a vast majority of the entire library that has ever been on an Xbox platform. That is something that no one else offers, Sony doesn't offer that, Nintendo definitely doesn't offer that. They just package you 3 old games together for $60, imagine if you already owned those games and you could stick them on your Switch just right now and just play them without having to rebuy them. And imagine that you would also get the advantages that Microsoft is giving these games. What is happening is, Microsoft is using the raw power of the Xbox Series X to brute force improve old games. To put this in perspective, Grand Theft Auto 4 on the Xbox 360 really struggles. It also really struggles on the Xbox One. You know where it doesn't struggle? On the Xbox Series X where it runs at a silky smooth 60fps without a single frame drop. Why is this possible? Well, the Xbox Series X is obviously a significantly more powerful platform than the Xbox One and the Xbox 360, even the Xbox One X. But the reason it can do this is because all old games run in what's called compatibility mode. That means it doesn't take advantage of any of the new features, it doesn't take advantage of the RT cores, it doesn't take advantage of any of the special functions that have been introduced in technology since then. What it does take advantage of is the increased clock speed on the CPUs and the raw GPU performance. Because of that, they are able to take that and brute force improve these games. Now you're seeing the improvements most of the time. There are some games that have dynamic resolution that obviously see a resolution improvement. But you're seeing most of the improvement come in terms of frame rate. Now people are like, why aren't the graphics better? The games aren't going to be graphically better unless they're remade. These are just taking old games and just making them perform better, making them perform close to a locked 60fps, which is better than they have ever done on any other home console platform. Obviously as PC gamers, some of these games that came on a PC, we've been able to lock it at 60 for a while. But put it this way, the Xbox Series X basically works like a PC. So while it's using PC architecture, when you upgrade your PC, I have a new GPU coming. I'd rather say my GPU was the brand new Radeon RDNA2 stuff that's in these systems but in GPU form for my desktop. Not even out on the market. Let's say I have that showing up and I plugged it into my system. Most of my games are going to run better. And they're going to run better because that graphics card is significantly more powerful than my Quadro 4200KS from 2010. It's significantly more powerful. So on brute force power alone, my games are going to look better. Now as drivers improve and other things happen, the games will perform better and better and better. But just on raw power alone, they will perform better just by plugging that graphics card into my computer. Same is true here. Microsoft has decided to take the power they have and allow it to brute force improve these things. In fact, they're even allowing auto HDR technology to happen where a lot of these games are getting to HDR treatment, which is helping their appearance and the appearance of the blacks on TV screens. That's really really good news. Now PlayStation is not doing this. PlayStation is currently offering backwards compatibility to I don't know like 99, 90 percent or so of the PlayStation 4 library, but they're not offering frame rate improvements. They're not offering resolution improvements. They are not brute forcing these games to allow them to run better. They're not doing it. They're also not letting you play your PlayStation 3 games or PlayStation 2 or PlayStation 1 games. In fact, if you want improvements to your PlayStation 4 games, you must, well, rebuy the games in remastered form on PlayStation 5. Oh, and you can't transfer your saves. You can't, I don't believe you can transfer saves from Xbox 360 and the original Xbox to the Xbox Series X, but you can transfer your saves from Xbox One. So yeah, it's a little baffling, right? That Sony is just not doing something that Microsoft is. And this is before we get into Quick Resume. Quick Resume is an amazing feature and allows you to suspend six to 12 games at once and quickly get back into them within seconds. It kind of works like save states if we're completely honest. And then there's the load time improvement. Now I do expect load times to actually improve on old games on PlayStation 4 as well because a lot of these improvements are just from it running on an SSD versus running on a hard drive, a spinning disk. Because if you take your hard drives out of your PlayStation 4 and your Xbox One and you replace it with SSDs, the load times also improve. So these load time improvements will probably happen as well, but we're seeing Call of Duty Warzone at 16 seconds on Xbox Series X, 21 seconds on the Xbox One X, Red Dead Redemption 2, 52 seconds, one minute, 35 on the Xbox One X. Like on and on and down, you're seeing the list on the screen, it's just significantly better on the Xbox Series X. And the thing is, the thing that's baffling here is that Microsoft is so forthright, so forthcoming, putting the hardware in trusted people's hands to independently review and talk about them. While Sony is still to even let anyone outside of themselves hold a PlayStation 5, I mean a PlayStation 5 is a monster. Maybe that's why. They have to send out press units eventually, otherwise how are press going to have reviews of their games up? Maybe Sony doesn't care, I don't know. But it's very interesting that Microsoft is basically checking every box you can check except obviously what we can argue is the most important box of all, exclusive content. The Xbox Series X does have an exclusive content problem at launch. There basically isn't any. Not anything that's significant, nothing like Demon's Souls. Demon's Souls is the reason to buy a PlayStation 5 at launch. The reason is Demon's Souls. But the Xbox Series X has Game Pass, has backwards compatibility to the entire library of Xbox. That's a pretty compelling reason to pick up an Xbox Series X at launch. A very compelling reason for many people that would want to just replace their old systems and their setup. There are a lot of people, maybe not a lot, but some enthusiasts out there that have an OG Xbox and Xbox 360 and an Xbox One all hooked up right now. They can replace all those systems with one. You can also use external hard drives with an Xbox Series X. That is yet to be announced for PlayStation 5. I presume you'll be able to do a PlayStation 5, but it hasn't been announced yet. It has been announced by Microsoft that you can use external hard drives that use the 3.1 USB connector. With that, while you won't play games directly off it, you can speed transfer games back and forth between the Velocity hard drive and what they call their SSD hard drive. And then with the external hard drive, which is actually really, really quick and can be done within minutes. And then you can just have all your games downloaded and ready to go next-gen or otherwise. This is something that is blowing my mind. It's how pro-consumer Microsoft continues to be. And how Sony is just answering with, we can't do that, sorry, nope, you're gonna have to spend this, nope, can't do that, not possible. Keeping in mind, keeping in mind that Sony is just showing you games and hoping you're forgetting about everything else. I hate being negative about Sony. I'm buying a PlayStation 5 at launch. I hate being negative. But man, we are in 2020. Sometimes the content isn't enough. Now for some of you guys, it clearly will be. It's just, Microsoft is just doing a lot of good. And I feel like they should just be successful on the back of actually being pro-consumer. You know how rare it is for a tech company to be pro-consumer? Do you guys know how rare that is? Almost every tech company out there, Nintendo included, is not exactly pro-consumer. They might act like they are, but they're not. Microsoft is actively losing millions and millions, if not billions of dollars, with the Xbox Series X and Game Pass. But they're doing so to convince people to buy their platform. They know they're from behind. They know they need to take a loss for future profits. So why not take advantage of it while we can, folks? I mean heck, you can, for stupid low prices if you bounce around the internet, end up with three years of Game Pass for hardly any money. I don't know what to tell you guys, other than kudos to Microsoft. Kudos, kudos, kudos. You guys, you did it. You did it. Thank you guys for tuning in. In case you didn't know, I'm doing something really cool with the Series X on launch. I'm gonna be tearing that baby apart. Might even do it on a live stream, we'll see. But I'm tearing that son of a bitch apart and we're putting some liquid metal on that APU. So stay tuned for that.