Xbox One X: Why should I buy Microsoft's new 4K console? Why shouldn't I?

There's one important question hanging over the brand new box

The upcoming 'XBox One X' is displayed during the Electronic Entertainment Expo E3 at the Los Angeles Convention Center on June 13, 2017 in Los Angeles, California. The console will be released on November 7, retail cost of $499 (Christian Petersen/Getty Images)

The Xbox One X is here. But why?

Among all the excitement about the brand new console – justified excitement, given it’s the most powerful such box ever made, and brings a whole range of new features – there’s been one question mostly unanswered. Who exactly is it for?

The console adds luscious 4K gaming, but at a time that most people don’t actually have TVs in their house that can show it. And it’s an entirely new Xbox just a year after the Xbox One S came out – a console that already led to questions about who it was for and why it was arriving now.

Of course, Microsoft has answers. The new console is for people with 4K TVs, of course – but also those without them, many of whom will end up getting them soon anyway. But it is really for a more abstract, meaningful group than that: anyone who wants to play their games on the best possible hardware available.

The X is for anyone, if “you want to play the best versions of games possible,” says Kevin Gammill, who helped lead the development of the console. “That’s true if you have a 4K TV or are yet to upgrade.”

That’s because despite the fact the headline feature is 4K TV, that’s really a symptom of the improvements rather than an improvement in itself. Underlying all of those changes, including the increased resolution, is a whole series of components that mean that the console is more powerful than any ever made.

That allows it not only to power the extra pixels required for 4K, much more work than in normal 1080p HD.

And it adds extra features even for those whose TVs aren’t ready to handle the increased resolution. Even among those still on old-school 1080p, the console uses its increased power to use a technology called supersampling, which brings some of the same benefits.

“t’s rendered internally as 4K, so as we supersample it to 1080p, you’ll see an additional level of detail,” says Gammill. “There are existing games that even if you’re running on 1080p will run better”.

Supersampling means, for instance, that the extra trees that might appear in the back of the screen because the game is made for 4K will appear on a normal HD TV, despite them not being strictly required. That, in turn, shows how even those with old TVs get to benefit from technologies built for brand new ones.

Beyond that, the increased power leads to a whole range of other features. A faster hard drive – 50 per cent faster, in fact – is combined with super-fast processors to allow games to load much faster, and avoid sitting watching loading screens.

For all that, the console is made for people who are playing on 4K TVs, either now or in the future. Microsoft has thrown much of its work at designing for the new technology, and the console’s primary selling point is its ability to support it, even if that’s not the most exciting thing about it.

As such, it’s a big bet by Microsoft. HD TV, for instance, might seem inevitable now but it wasn’t always that way – and it succeeded where other technologies like 3D failed. Microsoft made the conscious decision to avoid betting on that technology, despite the fact that TV makers and other companies were claiming it as the future – and the saviour of their profits.

Gammill describes the process of seeing 3D TV arrive, and gradually start filling up the technology tradeshows. Microsoft looked that for obvious reasons, he said – and decided not to go ahead with it.

That was an inflection point that it made the right decision on, he pointed out. And it was proof that not every new thing is worth jumping on.

4K, on the other hand, came with more obvious reasons to be excited. And it wasn’t just the extra resolution that the 4K name implies – but the fact that it was arriving with other technology like HDR and wide colour gamut displays, “the whole immersive experience”, as Gammill refers to it.

“We thought that would be a technology that would be appealing to consumers as well as gamers. That happened about the time we started talking about the Xbox One X,” he said, making clear that the X was aimed as a 4K console right from the start.

And so that led to the three primary pillars around which the X is designed. That’s headed up by performance, and the work that’s gone into that is obvious: the X is easily the most powerful console ever made, packed into a tiny box and made much more affordable than it would have been before or in any other form.

The other two pillars were a little more subtle: compatibility and craftsmanship. But they’re just as on display in the X, when you see and use it – that focus on craft is evident in the new, sophisticated matte black finish across the console, for instance, and the fact that it doesn’t have any of the bizarre design decisions that mark out the PlayStation.

When the console turns on, that same craft is clear. Microsoft have completely redesigned the software to go alongside the X (though everyone else will get it too) ensuring that it appears beautifully on big, ultra HD displays. And once you’re through that, the games look the same – stunning, lush, deep, colourful vision and sound that makes games more immersive than ever before.

All of which serves as something like an answer to that question that has dogged the X. It’s for everyone with a 4K TV ready to display such wonders, and it’s for everyone without one, too.