Last week Windows Central ran a story about potential Xbox Series X specs (still called Xbox Scarlett/Anaconda as we did not know the official name of new console at that time). They claim that according to a number of sources, the Xbox Series X GPU raw power target is around 12TFlop. As this is the best source we have right now on the new Xbox’s potential specs, let’s assume their sources are correct.
On top of that there are a number of other insiders like Jason Schreier that claim that Next Gen console’s GPUs should be more powerful than high end PC cards like the RTX 2080. Some people took it to heart even though it’s still a rumor. They are even claiming that the Xbox Series X GPU should compete with NVIDIA’s RTX 2080 Ti cards. But is that even possible?
Checking official RTX 2080 Ti specs reveals that faster FE card offers around 14,2 TFlops. We calculate it by multiplying “boost clock speed” x “number of cuda cores” x 2 (two operations per clock). So going by TFlops alone we can already say that RTX 2080 Ti has an advantage here. On top of that, Turing based cards seem to offer better performance per TFlop.
Power vs. Power
In the above screenshots, we can clearly see that even though RTX 2070 Super card offers lower specs than RX 5700 XT ( same number of cores but lower boost clock speed to be exact ) it actually offers 9% better performance in games on average as per TechSpot benchmarks. This suggests that RTX 2080 Ti would be at least 25% faster than the rumored 12TFlops Xbox Series X GPU if new Xbox specs got confirmed.
It’s also worthwhile to mention that even if a next gen Xbox ended up using improved 2nd generation RDNA micro-architecture it would probably not close the raw power gap. Some people might say that consoles are better optimized and games just run better on consoles. However, that varies on a developer by developer basis and the resources available. In the past I have seen very well optimized games on both consoles and desktop PCs but also very poorly optimized games too. So we would have to go case by case – game by game to come to any meaningful conclusions especially now that devs has started putting more effort in PC port optimization.
As Xbox Series X final specs has not been officially confirmed, all we have right now are leaks and rumors. Take everything you hear with a grain of salt.
