Preorder details about Microsoft’s vaunted Xbox One X, a souped-up version of its Xbox One games console due this November and designed to play games with breathtaking 4K fidelity, are coming this weekend, says Microsoft. The company says it’ll spill the beans about how to get your mitts on the device in the lead up to Europe’s annual Gamescom game show, this Sunday, at 3:00 p.m. ET.
Microsoft’s official Xbox Twitter account just tweeted the news alongside a teaser trailer for its Gamescom lineup, as well as a link to an Xbox Wire brief detailing some of its trade show plans.
Microsoft first confirmed the new Xbox One’s existence at E3 2016, codenamed “Project Scorpio,” then unveiled its official “Xbox One X” name and $499 price tag a few months ago at E3 2017. The super-games-console offers 6 teraflops of GPU compute power, 12 gigabytes of DDR5 memory and boasts games capable of running at native (as opposed to approximate) 4K resolutions. Sony’s PlayStation 4 Pro, which arrived last November, offers notably slower (though still quite powerful) performance for $399, or $100 less.
“There is no power greater than X,” said Xbox boss Phil Spencer during Microsoft’s big E3 2017 press event. “It’s the most powerful console ever made.”
As I wrote then: “But if the battle in the 4K graphics space is currently about chasing enthusiast wallets, Microsoft is positioning Xbox One X as a box that justifies the extra outlay with raw specs capable of delivering much more than Sony’s product to videophiles and 4K connoisseurs. If the narrative around the Xbox One and PlayStation 4’s debut in 2013 centered on the PlayStation 4’s superior specs, today’s show was Microsoft taking the ball back … Xbox One X will also make existing Xbox One games look better and load faster, uses a liquid-cooled vapor chamber to tame its doubtless nutty thermals (a first for a console) and still somehow winds up being the smallest Xbox console the company’s made, including the Xbox One S.”
The Xbox One X will be available on November 7, worldwide.
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Write to Matt Peckham at matt.peckham@time.com