There's been no news of Project Scarlett,the new Xbox coming in late 2020, but today we're getting two official news stories. The first comes directly from Phil Spencer,head of Microsoft's Gaming area, who during a live broadcast on Destiny 2 with Bungie (and here already the rapprochement between the two companies would make news in itself) claimed to have played this week for the first time of games on Scarlett.

This means that the console, or at least one prototype of it, is already able to show off its capabilities by running the first games in development. Now only the question remains when these will be shown to the public: at E3 2020 or earlier?

The second interesting news about the powerful new console comes from The Coalition'sTechnical Art Director Colin Penty: the Gears 5 developer revealed in aninterview with GameSpot that the new console will have dedicated GPU cores exclusively to ray-tracing. We already knew Scarlett would support ray-tracing, but it was unclear whether this would happen through software libraries or with dedicated hardware; let's find out now that it's the second case. This will certainly ensure great performance for those titles that want to take advantage of ray-tracing to improve some aspects of rendering such as reflections, highlights, shadows, and so on.

For now it's all about Project Scarlett: keep following us for more information!