Microsoft Xbox One Launching in India on September 23 Starting Rs. 39,990

Following its pre-E3 2014 press conference, Microsoft has announced the Xbox One will be available in India from September 23, priced at Rs. 39,990 for the Xbox One without Kinect model, and Rs. 45,990 with the Kinect.

Both bundles will include the Xbox One console with a 500GB hard drive, Xbox One Wireless Controller, and a free 14-day trial of Xbox Live Gold for new members.

Microsoft notes that by September the Xbox One launch line-up in India will include such anticipated games as Forza Horizon 2 and Halo: The Master Chief Collection, which comes with the Halo 5: Guardians multiplayer beta.

Microsoft had announced a rough September timeline for India launch (along with 25 other countries) back in March. Notably, Sony launched the PS4 in India (at the same Rs. 39,990 price) in January, making Microsoft's entry with the Xbox One roughly 9 months late.

The Redmond giant announced the cheaper version of the Xbox One, without the bundled Kinect, in May, and let users view popular entertainment apps such as Netflix and ESPN without a $60-plus "Live" subscription.

Both the Microsoft Xbox One and Sony PlayStation 4 sport an integrated CPU-GPU design by AMD, featuring an 8-core low power x86-64 AMD "Jaguar" CPU. The Xbox One's CPU cores are clocked at 1.75GHz, compared to the Sony PlayStation 4's 1.6GHz.

(Also see: Xbox One Developers Given More GPU Bandwidth for Better-Looking Games)

While this difference in clock speed is relatively insignificant, the implementation of the GPUs seem certain to create some differences in performance. The Xbox One features a GPU similar to the entry-level Bonaire GPU found on the Radeon HD 7790, while the PlayStation 4 features a GPU similar to the mid-range Pitcairn GPU found on the Radeon HD 7870. While the GPU clock speed is higher on the Xbox One, the difference in GPU processing performance should be tangible.

Both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 feature 8GB of RAM, though while Sony has opted for the much faster 5500MHz GDDR5 RAM on its console, Microsoft has gone in for 2133MHz DDR3 RAM on the Xbox One, giving the Japanese manufacturer another advantage that may not be offset by the Xbox One's implementation of ESRAM (all 32MB of it) for caching purposes.