Microsoft has confirmed that the upcoming Xbox Scarlett will be able to play games at 4K. The company has also said that games will be able to run at 120 frames per second. It should be noted that games will either run at 4K or at a lower resolution at 120 frames per second. It is not possible for games to run at 4k and 120 frames per second. The top of the line GPU today, the NVIDIA RTX 2080Ti cannot achieve this with a state of the art PC, so it is highly unlikely that a console will be able to run games at 4K 120fps. But considering the hardware powering the Xbox Scarlett console, it is possible for it to achieve 4K gaming or high frame rate gaming.
In conversation with Xbox Official Magazine, Microsoft says, “But, with the next-gen, I think you’ll see a big upgrade in CPU because we really want to make sure that you don’t have any compromises with the framerates. Yes, we can do 4K, but we can also do 120 frames per second. So I think that type of capability will be something that people don’t see today.”
The biggest upgrade to the PS5 and Xbox Scarlett will be the CPU. The new consoles will run on the AMD Ryzen Zen 2 CPU and Navi GPU with hardware-enabled Ray Tracing. In the past, Microsoft did say that the new console is 4 times more powerful than the Xbox One X (read our review here). Microsoft has also confirmed that the new console will use SSD storage and come with GDDR6 memory. Sony has also confirmed SSD storage for the PS5.
One of the key highlights for Microsoft has been backwards compatibility and for the upcoming consoles, it looks like both Sony and Microsoft are looking at enabling backwards compatibility on their respective consoles.
Details of the look of the Xbox Scarlett are not known but recently leaked images have shown us the look of the PS5 dev kit. This shouldn't be mistaken as the final unit as Sony has a history of making the dev kits look different from the final unit. In the case of the PS4, the dev kit was underpowered when compared to the launched PS4 so it is possible that some features, specs and abilities of the PS5 and Xbox Scarlett could change before launch.