E3 2019: 7 Ups & 6 Downs From Microsoft's Conference

2. Project Scarlett Has An SSD, With 120 FPS/8K Capabilities, Releases Holiday 2020

Microsoft wrapped up their show with a short segment devoted to Project Scarlett, and though it's disappointing how little truly interesting information we learned, the technical specs definitely show Microsoft throwing the gauntlet down to Sony in the battle for next-gen supremacy.

First and foremost, it was revealed that Scarlett is fitted with a solid-state drive (SSD), which will ensure significantly faster load times than a conventional hard disk drive, as anyone who's ever used an SSD can surely testify.

Elsewhere, Scarlett will rock a custom-designed Zen 2 processor from AMD, which has the potential to deliver four-times the power of the Xbox One X.

And in an interesting move, Scarlett will support up to 8K resolutions and be capable of frame rates up to 120 FPS, while making use of in vogue ray tracing technology.

With Microsoft trying to bridge the gap between traditional games consoles and PCs, it makes all the sense in the world that they'd be aiming north of 60FPS.

Given how few current-gen console games can actually maintain even a solid 60, though, it'll be interesting to see what consistent rates Scarlett will practicably be able to achieve.

Either way, this was an intriguing taster of things to come, if certainly more vague than most would've liked.