 When we first saw the specs of the new Xbox One X, we were intrigued to say the least. There's 40 compute units, it has native support for 4K 60fps gameplay. Are there asterisks next to these claims that are going to leave us disappointed? Or are we finally looking at a console that achieves both affordability and a PC-like gameplay experience? Speaking of not being disappointed, today's video is brought to you by TunnelBear. TunnelBear makes it easy to privately and securely browse a more open internet, and to try TunnelBear for free, go to TunnelBear.com slash LTT. So even though it's being touted as the most powerful console ever, Microsoft's latest keeps the familiar Xbox One branding rather than adopting a new name that would immediately indicate an all-new experience. But this makes sense on some level. Although the Xbox One X is graphically more capable than last year's Xbox One S, the changes to its internal architecture are evolutionary rather than revolutionary. You'll be plugging in the same ports and playing the same games on the same controller just with prettier pixels. So if you think about it, buying a console has become more like a PC than ever before. There are now two models of the PlayStation 4 and three of the Xbox One whose primary differences are form factor, power efficiency, and graphics card configuration. Just like the gaming computer shelf at a Best Buy or something like that. That is not to say, though, that the specification differences between the Xbox One X and its predecessors aren't significant. On a sheet of paper to some people, they're just higher numbers. The higher clocked Jaguar CPU is literally just that. But looking closely at the graphics configuration of this new custom chip reveals that its closest desktop PC equivalent is probably a Radeon RX 580, which is a very capable card. So in practical terms, they make possible the big selling point for the console, its support for 4K gaming at 60 FPS natively. Understandably, Microsoft hasn't been shy about this hardware investment, marketing the Xbox One X as a premium experience. Now of course, that doesn't mean you can expect to find a water cooling system and an SSD in it, but it is equipped with a beefier vapor chamber heatsink than we saw in the Xbox One S that kept the hottest part of the system at a reasonable 70 degrees under load without getting obnoxiously loud. And there's a one terabyte hard drive that is advertised as up to 50% faster, a benefit not just to game load times, but also when the system needs to stream in higher resolution textures as you wander around open environments. Feature wise, the One X is state of the art. It comes with out of the box support for both HDR 10 high dynamic range, redundant, I know, you can learn more about it up here, but basically it amounts to deeper blacks, brighter whites, and more vibrant colors on supported displays. Along with that, there's also Dolby Atmos, a surround sound technology that encodes audio as objects instead of individual channels for greater positional accuracy and realism. With the proper home theater hardware, Atmos is a game changer. Dolby Atmos headphone is also supported with a $15 add-on purchase, but the Gears 4 Dolby headphone experience and even some canned demos, they were pretty underwhelming. So I would hold off on this one at least for now. Now let's look at the visual experience. We gathered our competitors and settled on a test suite of games that showed off the Xbox One X's different ways of rendering 4K content. Let's kick things off with Forza 7. This was one of the titles Microsoft demoed prior to the One X's launch to show off its native 4K 60 capabilities. Unsurprisingly, the Xbox One X absolutely shined in this game. Not only did it give us much better detail than the upscaled 4K from the One S, it was even a little bit better than our $500 PC, which was running the game at 4K on the recommended preset at around 45 FPS. Anti-aliasing helped our PC a little bit, but the Xbox One X showed off details we couldn't quite make out on the PC, even the controls on the dashboard inside our car. And it did so while running the game noticeably more smooth. So yeah, score one for the One X here. Though of course, this is a Microsoft exclusive game, so the PS4 Pro didn't actually get a crack at it. So let's move right along to Shadow of War, another native 4K title, but one that only runs at 30 FPS on the One X. This game looked more or less equally nice on the PS4 Pro and the Xbox One X, both in terms of frame rate and texture quality, and the One S again was noticeably less sharp due to the lack of native 4K support. The system that gave us the worst overall experience at 4K was our, well, our $500 PC, which had to turn down to the lowest preset to be playable. But obviously we are aware that that could be due to video memory limitation and should be noted that at 1080p and ultra details, it kept pace much better. Now let's look at Assassin's Creed Origins, which uses checkerboard rendering at 4K on both of our flagship consoles. This ended up being a very similar story to Shadow of War, with the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X looking nearly identical, the One S a little bit less sharp, and the $500 PC was only playable on the low preset until we turned down the resolution. But you should note that on PC there's a lot of performance issues due to some funky DRM stuff that's going on. A weird aside here is that although Ubisoft called Assassin's Creed on the Xbox One X the definitive version of the game, we were very hard pressed to notice anything that made it stand out. But Microsoft says it isn't all about 4K, and they claim that the more powerful processor in the Xbox One X will, like we've been doing on our PC during our testing, allow the use of higher quality assets at 1080p. So we turned down the resolution of both our One X and our PC to 1080p, then cranked our PC presets up to ultra quality on each game. And to the Xbox's credit, all three games looked nearly identical with the small caveat that we needed to enable the favor quality setting on Shadow of War. This customizability is a fantastic trend that we support and we'd like to see continue, but if you're going to be gaming on a 1080p display for the foreseeable future, this doesn't necessarily give the most powerful console ever an unequivocal recommendation. That's because for us, if we're going to have a similar gaming experience anyways, we'd rather go for a more versatile PC that isn't restricted to one specific console ecosystem. With that said, the 4K experience is a bit of a different story. If you have to build a PC from the ground up for $500, especially if you're including Windows in that price, the Xbox One X craps all over the 4K gaming experience you'd be having if you want to buy brand new hardware from a store with a warranty and all of that and not do the whole Scrapyard Wars thing at this point in time. But if you're comparing to a PS4 Pro, which is $100 cheaper and has the same support for technologies like HDR and Dolby Atmos bitstream passthrough, along with very similar gaming performance in a fair amount of titles, well that $100 premium gets you the awesome UHD 4K Blu-ray playback if you're going to use that, and most importantly for the majority of people, more powerful hardware that should deliver a higher percentage of games at crispy 4K60. There's also the awesome benefit of Xbox Play Anywhere, which allows you to play your games on both Xbox and PC with just one purchase, which is great for both being able to play with your friends despite being on potentially a different platform and as an awesome value add. I do have to wrestle with the always infuriating Windows Store on the PC side, but I'll take it if it means that I get my game on both platforms without paying twice. Super cool. Another thing to consider is that if you've already got a PC with a 4K display and $500 burning a hole in your pocket, it might be worth upgrading. That will likely net you the best 4K gaming experience for your money, but the Xbox One X absolutely has a place in the market if you have or will soon obtain a 4K TV, HDR for an added bonus, and if you want a console to take full advantage of it. The Xbox One X absolutely will deliver the best frame rates and the highest resolution for consoles. And before you scream about it, no, it's not a replacement for GTX 1080, it's not a replacement for Vega 64, these things can run 4K at eye-popping frame rates, that's wonderful, but it might be enough to stem the tide of X-Bone and Peasant Station jokes, at least for a while, maybe in some corners of the United- Who am I kidding? It's not going to do anything, I'm sure there's already a massive war in the comments of this video before we even got to this section, so whatever, at least the console guys got something cool, I'm happy for them. It's going to be good. And I can be happy for you too because you can get Squarespace, what a segue. 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