The Xbox Series X impressed many when it unveiled its specifications back in 2020. As one of the consoles giving gamers a next-generation experience, the Xbox Series X offered to do much more than its predecessor the Xbox One. Many even compared the 120FPS and SSD loading times provided by the Xbox Series X to that of a high-end gaming PC to see how the console measured up against a supposedly more powerful machine.
While the Xbox Series X and S are some of the most powerful consoles available today, there may be some trouble brewing with the machines. Despite its improved performance, one Xbox Series X owner has uncovered a strange glitch that sees it unable to play the new games available on the Series X at peak performance. Posting their findings to Reddit, vzplan explained that when testing the performance between their two Xbox Series X consoles, one was slower than the other by 5%.
This is allegedly a problem caused by the system clock timing being off on one of the consoles, which causes a problem with its overall performance. Explaining the issue further, vzplan said that one of their consoles was slower than the normal console by 2 minutes in 40 minutes. When resetting both Xbox Series X consoles to 10:00 AM, by 10:20 the slower console was reading 10:19, and by 10:40, the slower read 10:38. Frames were an issue as well, with the slower console having noticeable differences in FPS counts and slower animations.
Though it seems that very few have had this issue besides vzplan, many gamers without two Xbox Series X consoles to compare may have a slower system clock without realizing it. Comments in the Reddit post suggested that the user contact Microsoft support, who could assess whether the issue is one with the hardware of the Xbox Series X or if it is something more widespread. Many Xbox users were impressed by vzplan's research and scared by the possibility of this issue being widespread, which would mean there could be another major issue with the next-gen consoles besides scalpers.
Of course, gaming consoles have had serious hardware issues before. Nintendo Switch users are often reporting that their Joy-Cons are "drifting" without any player input. With Xbox specifically, there was also the "red ring of death," which plagued many Xbox 360 owners as it signaled the end of their console's lifespan. So far, there's no word on whether this system clock issue is widespread among Xbox Series X consoles like the red ring of death was.