Xbox 720 Development Kit Photos Surface

Our first look at what developers are using to make next-gen games.

Photos of a next-generation Xbox development kit have come online. The images were first spotted on the AssemblerGames forums when a user named DaE attempted to sell the kit for $10,000. At the time, the pictures were met with heavy skepticism and many assumed they were simply a hoax.

If you have been keeping up with the Xbox 720 leak saga, you’ll know that the term Durango has been waved around numerous times, sometimes referred to as just a codename, while other reports even put the name down as the final product name for the next Xbox.

we heard back in November that Xbox 720 development kits would be ready by   Christmas 2011.

DaE reports that the most recent round of development kits were sent out in February, with Intel CPUs and an NVIDA graphics card. He says the kit sports 8GB of RAM (though other sources say 12GB) and has a 64-bit operating system.

We haven’t been able to verify these specs, but when we last heard about the system, sources told IGN it would be six times more powerful than current-gen consoles and would feature an AMD 6000 series GPU similar to the Radeon HD 6670. That specific processor includes support for DirectX11, a feature specified in most next-gen job listings. DaE also provided Digital Foundry with a screenshot of Microsoft’s Visual Studio coding tool being used for Durango.

                               Durango coding at work in Microsoft's Visual Studio tool.

A lot of you will probably say that it resembles a PC base. It remains to be seen though if this is the same black box that reportedly has six times the power of current gen consoles from Sony and Microsoft. This isn’t obviously the final design of the next Xbox, but it could be a great indication.

What are your initial impressions of the pictures – would you be happy with another ‘rectangular’ design for the next Xbox or not?

All images in this article courtesy of Digital Foundry.