Xbox One X comes hand in hand with massive downloads

Last year’s One S was a tidy, simple white box, and the One X has followed suit, only in black.

Not every Xbox One X enhanced game is going to have support for HDR. If nothing else, the Xbox One X is future-proofing for us console faithful.

We expected the X to be the odd few seconds faster here and there, but we didn’t expect it to be significantly faster in many cases.

The new user interface is created to allow you to get a whole lot more out of your gaming including joining friends online, look for groups, club activity and watch friends broadcasting their gameplay. The games will still work on any XBOX One model however the displaying image on your TV will be a true 4K HDR resolution and not an upscaled one. Jacking it in for a new one would need good reasoning.

Gears of War 4, for instance, ticks all three of those categories, and actually delivers on the non-4K, non-HDR enhancements front by letting players choose to up the frame rate (for a consistent 60fps across all modes, instead of just competitive). The weight surprised me a little as it is much heavier than I anticipated. Really, to make the most out of the new console, you’ll need an improved TV. Many Xbox 360 games can be popped right into the Xbox One X and some may even receive an upgrade in visual quality. The only issue I have with the guts is the 1TB hard drive.

The Switch is no slouch, and many of its first-party games are so colorful and vivid that they look great in 1080p anyway, but on games that overlap between the two consoles, there are going to be times where the Switch version will feel a lot more sluggish, and look much less crisp than the Xbox One X version of the same game. I played a lot of Assassin’s Creed Origins on the Pro, so I conducted a scientific survey by playing a lot of it on the Xbox One X. On the Xbox One X the draw distance is better (so you can see things from further away), and the framerate is smoother, which is noticeable in the panning cinematics in Origins. If not, be wary of blitzing through your download cap (mine has been smashed this month).

What’s under the hood though is every bit the beast that you’ve heard it to be – and it’s remarkable that the RRP is only $649 in Australia.

When that’s done, back out to System, then select “Backup & Transfer”. This includes Microsoft’s own titles, which you would expect all to be updated by launch, but of their marquee titles only Gears of War 4, Halo 5: Guardians and Quantum Break have been updated so far, the latter two being updated yesterday with a 15GB and a staggering 95GB download respectively.

You’re not done here, though. The game itself is just shy of 84GB but if you download the additional TV-show episodes and play the game the way it was intended, then the file size jumps up to 159GB.

If you don’t know what you’re missing, all the better!

With a Canadian starting price of $599 – generally $250 more than the Xbox One S, its lower-powered sibling, and $100 more than rival PS4 Pro – this is a console that is squarely aimed at the hardest of the hardcore Xbox gamers.

With a RRP price from $649, the Xbox One X goes on sale on November 7 with pre-orders available from the Microsoft store. Honestly, that’s the last thing you want to do when you’re shifting to an online competitive multiplayer match.

The catch, of course, is that these features are only available in certain games (are you noticing a running theme here yet?). For the time being, here are the best places to preorder an Xbox One X. We’ll also be keeping an eye out on the best deals and bundles in the run-up to launch, so you don’t have to.

It’s clear that the Xbox One X has struck a chord with the gaming market, and that makes flawless sense. Whilst I’ve played these titles at preview events and have faith that they’ll be brilliant on the One X, it has to be mentioned that they’re not now available. My PS4 can sound like a desk fan when I boot it up; however, the Xbox One X is remarkably quiet. In fairness, these are fairly obviously labelled, but it’s best to get it right the first time so you can rule that out as a potential troubleshooting step (especially if you’re groping blindly with an HDMI cable). So please don’t abuse your TV if initially the XBOX One X thinks your TV isn’t HDR compatible. Lets brush up on a few things you should probabaly know. Already exhausted and haggard after a long day at PAX AUS, a handful of Stevivor crew stayed up until 3.00am watching episode after episode of Planet Earth II, crazily lifelike in native 4K. It might take several passes on either side to ensure that you’ve truly maximized the image quality. The power brick is gone, the gloss has been mostly removed and it is now a power unit that needs to be connected to power and your TV before lift-off.

The recent arrival of Xbox Original backward compatibility is worth mentioning, too. At least I could keep up in both examples. I paired it up with a 55-inch LG C7P television (,800) – a fantastic UHD set with among the best 4K performance in the market – to find out what the real take-home is. It’s not too onerous to ignore and simply duck into your games library, and you can easily access recently used games through the Guide quick menu that is where most of the system’s functionality lives.

And I am always prepared to go the extra mile for you guys.