This is a fascinating look at how the game looks and performs across the next generation machines!
It's incredible to see 120Hz gaming brought to the mainstream!
Seeing how the Xbox Series X and PS5 fair performance-wise with ray tracing enabled was interesting, in the most demanding scenes there was a performance advantage of around 30% Such as 43 vs 60 fps on the Xbox Series X, possibly hinting at the advantage of the additional ray tracing accelerators on the GPU of the Series X, however there could be many variables at play here which has led to this, including the dynamic resolution scaling.
The Series S missing out on ray tracing is unfortunate as it lacks one of the standout features of the next generation consoles, but this is just one game which has to launch on 6 different consoles, so I can imagine it would have been challenging to balance everything at once, especially during a pandemic.
It will be fascinating to see how all of these consoles fair when more next generation exclusives release, software built from the ground up to take advantage of the new hardware will really give them a chance to shine!
I've seen developers concerned the hardware configuration of the Series S, so rendering resolution aside I wouldn't be surprised if some games are not 1:1 conversions, but the vast majority of multi-platform games are built to scale anyway, especially since most of them are on PC, and PCs have many configurations and the games have a multitude of adjustable graphical settings.
For the Series S, I think its greatest shortcomings performance-wise will be the ram capacity and theoretical teraflops, but its still great to see that this machine isn't artificially confined to 1080p and that 1440p resolutions can be reached in certain circumstances.
Presuming the vast majority of games will be bound by compute performance, something like a 5.28 TF GPU may have been a more feasible configuration for a 1440p Xbox "Series X" if that's what the Xbox team were going for.
Edit: Typo, wrote Series X instead of Series S.
If I were to hazard a guess, the PS5 drops are seem bandwidth related than GPU. There is plethora of alpha effects on screen where the PS5 generally takes a bit of momentary tumble whereas XSX is able to power through with its 560GBps bandwidth (as opposed to PS5's 448GBps). And as is, RT features are bandwidth sensitive as well. I wonder what this signals for future optimizations.
Also:
Note the lower LoD models on XSS- The chain gun looks notably less round compared to XSX/PS5. This and other things make me wonder whether feature parity sans resolution is even going to be actually be a thing down the line beyond a rather short sighted marketing point, as more titles shift towards purely next gen development.
The additional bandwidth could definitely be playing a role!
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