The countdown to the Next Xbox

By Rob Crossley for CVG UK

A vacuum of facts will always be filled by speculation and Microsoft's next Xbox is a marvellous example of this.

It's quite a staggering feat that a project of this size still remains a relative mystery when so close to its big press conference reveal - now confirmed for Tuesday, May 21 - all off the back of a twelve-month storm of rumour and conjecture.

Some facts, however, have slipped the net. If you haven't been able to catch up on all the speculation over the past year, and indeed are not sure what to believe, CVG offers a handy guide that analyses all the credible rumours ahead of Microsoft's big reveal.

Remember, nothing has been confirmed, plans can change, but some forecasts seem reliable. Here are the key issues...

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Index:

• Reveal date / Hardware spec
• The controller / Kinect 2.0
• Always Online? / Pre-owned play
• Backwards incompatibility / XTV
• Price and release / Other speculation

Showtime

Context: Microsoft and Sony have been drawn into a tactical game of pre-announcement Hold 'em ever since Larry Hryb, the director of programming for Xbox Live, posted a shrewdly ambiguous E3 countdown timer on his personal blog back in January. Despite what the ticker suggests, Microsoft has always intended to show off its new console before E3.

In the first three months of 2013 there has been some wonderful legerdemain and bluffs from both companies. None were more bare-faced than when Sony CEO Kaz Hirai publicly stated that PlayStation would wait for Microsoft to make the first move while, privately, the company was of course finalising plans to get in first.

The absence of the next Xbox (publicly, at least) at events such as GDC has given Microsoft fewer options to pitch its next-gen philosophy to the wider industry. The result is a special one-of press conference on the company's own Redmond campus, hosted by Don Mattrick, the president of Interactive Entertainment at Microsoft.

Invites have now been sent out to the consumer press as, behind the scenes, Microsoft prepares for a string of announcements in an attempt to steal Sony and Nintendo's thunder in the build up to E3. Below is an image of the flyers, which have been emailed to select press outlets, publishers, developers and analysts.

Hardware spec

The short of it: The Next Xbox hardware will likely come close to PS4 standards

Context: Details on the innards of Microsoft's next console have leaked for more than six months now, with fresh devkit data routinely revealed on games news publications. The trouble is that the ever-evolving nature of hardware development means that not everything is fixed nor certain.

Most reports, however, corroborate the rumour that Microsoft's Durango features a 1.6GHz AMD CPU which is arranged in two sets of quad-cores. It is also believed to carry a custom 800MHz graphics processor with 12 shader cores providing a total of 768 threads.

Some say this will give the PS4 a raw computational advantage. VG247 reported in January that the next PlayStation will have a run-capability of 1.84 teraflops while the next Xbox will achieve 1.23 teraflops. It is unclear whether this remains accurate today.

The most uncertain element, however, is the memory. In January it was reported that the PS4's RAM measured to 4GB of super-fast GDDR5, but Sony decided to double that capacity at the eleventh hour. In an interview with VideoGamer, Just Add Water CEO Stewart Gilray explained:

"We were told [PS4] was 4GB originally and we first knew it had 8GBs when Sony said so at the PlayStation Meeting [in February]. We'd had kits at that point for a good while."

Interestingly, throughout this whole period there has been one single claim about the next Xbox's memory - that it will carry 8Gb of the slower GDDR3 and reserve about 3GB of that for the operating system. While Sony has stated that the PS4 can move data around at a remarkable 176 GB per second, it is believed that the next Xbox's "move engines" can achieve 100 GB/s.

But what's clear is that, during this period of flux in the games hardware arms race, Microsoft may perform a last-gasp upgrade to its memory specs to better match the PS4.

In a recent interview with Eurogamer, Ubisoft Montreal exec Yannis Mallat said that Microsoft's next console will be "aligned with what Sony announced".