UPDATED 07:03 EDT / JUNE 14 2016

NEWS

Microsoft lights up E3 2016 with two new consoles, claims “the most powerful console ever built”

Microsoft did not let people down at this year’s E3 event following months of speculation as to what the company might announce. Microsoft’s Xbox chief Phil Spencer had said prior to the event that consumers were going to see something “really substantial” and that’s just what they got.

In terms of substance, the biggest announcement was that Microsoft will release two new consoles. One of these is Project Scorpio, which Microsoft says will be the “most powerful console ever built.” The console will be a 4K, VR-ready machine with full backwards compatibility. It was said during the conference that a VR version of Fallout 4 would be available for Scorpio, although it wasn’t stated what headset will be used with the console.

Although rumors have pointed to Microsoft teaming-up with Oculus, Spencer told The Verge: “We’re not ready to announce something right now, but you can imagine at the price point of Scorpio — which we haven’t actually said, but think about consoles and where they live in terms of price point — having something at six teraflops that will get millions of people buying it is very attractive to some of the VR companies that are out there already, and we’ve architected it such that something will be able to plug right in and work.”

All Xbox One games, and accessories, will work on the Scorpio (that’s the codename), according to Microsoft, except the graphics will be much better due to it having a graphics card with 6TFLOPs (trillion floating point operations per second) and an 8-core processor. It will also have 320GB/s of memory bandwidth. We can expect to see the Xbox Scorpio sometime during the fall 2017.

The other big hardware announcement, which was expected, was a smaller, lightweight console. The console, the Xbox One S, will also play any Xbox One games. At 40 percent smaller than the previous Xbox One, it’s the smaller Xbox yet. It has a USB port on the front, a redesigned controller, Bluetooth support, High Dynamic Range (HDR) support, 4K DVD and Blu-Ray playback. Microsoft also got rid of the power brick.

The Xbox One S will be available in August this year. There will be a standard 500 Gb version for $299. A 1 TB version for $349 and a limited edition 2 TB version for $399.

Photo credit: Xbox

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