More than any other feature, the garage turns out to be the center of the next two game consoles. Microsoft and Sony have taken other approaches to the garage and garage extension, leaving us with questions about both. The official product page for the Microsoft Xbox Series X Garage Extension Card is now online, but it doesn’t answer many of our persistent questions.
Both corporations have garage answers for their consoles.
At Sony, the PlayStation five comprises 82 five GB of internal storage. This strange skill comes from the fact that the reader is not only an NVMe reader connected to the motherboard, but rather discrete stressed chips. The unit is optimized for speed and Sony offers speeds of five, five GB/s, which are then amplified by accelerated decompression through the hardware. Sony says that with its new decompression equipment, the equivalent of 9GB/s.
Microsoft, meanwhile, uses a more classic NVMe SSD on the Xbox Series X, which has a gross throughput of 2.4GB/sy 4.8GB/s. Microsoft’s Xbox Velocity architecture contributes to this with elements such as spreading pattern feedback. A game developer explained on Twitter that you can, with a variety of smart textures, finish loading only the 576KB you want from a given texture, rather than the gig medium of textures you would load.
Both units are faster than the current generation, but it’s a bit like saying that one car is faster while the other takes shortcuts. It’s not exactly about apples and apples.
Similarly, the two corporations adopt other approaches to expansion. Sony will allow you to put your own NVMe player on your PlayStation 5, but you can’t just take a player off the shelf and put it on the PlayStation 5. Because the Formula Player is so fast, only approved units will appear on the PlayStation 5. It’s easy to see how this can be confusing and frustrating, even for experienced players.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is following what appears to be a back road. Xbox Series X will use special garage extension cards. That’s right: souvenir cards. These cute little NVMe discs come in a traditional case, like a classic reminiscence card, that fits the back of the Xbox Series X. Cards are produced for the X Series through Seagate. However, the Seagate website provides certain information.
These cards offer a capacity of 1 TB array, doubling the internal storage of 1 TB of the X-series. The internal memory of the card is a traditional GEN4x2 PCIe NVMe card and Seagate offers a three-year card warranty. It’s simpler, faster and harder to mess up, but offers less tradition.
The most important question, then, is how Microsoft plans to use extension cards. The challenge with the memory cards of yesteryear was that they charged exorbitant fees for relatively small amounts of souvenirs. Consoles are more like computers now, and consumers perceive a much larger amount of 1 TB. It will be difficult for Microsoft to impose a maximum value without suffering a backlash. But then, unless you allow third-party brands to sign up for the fray, the partnership between Microsoft and Seagate will be the only way to expand your Xbox Series X storage. A higher value can be the kind of bad press that Microsoft doesn’t need. Using something closer to the popular reminiscence of NVMe, than high-end parts sought through Sony, can facilitate production and therefore more competitive value.
These are questions that we are waiting for answers and may not arrive for a few months. Microsoft and Sony are in a game adjusted for console pricing, and no one is blinking yet.
If Microsoft launches a less expensive Xbox Series X with 256 GB of garage space, this garage extension card makes sense. Otherwise, few players would have to increase the capacity of their garage. Most simply remove finished games and download new games.
A 256GB Xbox SeX can contain approximately four AAA games in existing game sizes. It’s going to be tight.
I agree. I don’t want to buy games. But then, friends with slower internet connections like to collect games and don’t like to delete them if they don’t have to. So you can count on things like that. I probably wouldn’t buy an extension until I probably wanted it.
This reminds me of PS Vita’s reminiscencence cards… Array oooh brother!