Thanks. Seems to not be hot on how it'll affect optimization. And good Lord at the fanboy comments to that tweet. I can see this tweet being dragged out for the entirety of next gen.
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XBox Series S & Xbox Series X Official Specs Comparison
- Thread starter RexNovis
- Start date
Thanks. Seems to not be hot on how it'll affect optimization. And good Lord at the fanboy comments to that tweet. I can see this tweet being dragged out for the entirety of next gen.
Seems an odd thing to say from a Remedy developer when most of their games are available for PCs.
But regardless - more work for a bigger market seems like good trade off, no?
BW is on the low side, but how will the difference in RAM work? This will require drastically lowered asset sizes for it to work.
Our thoughts? I've seen people argue about RAM speeds in this thread, but they aren't as important as a metric as you think they would be for your typical game. Also keep in mind the 2GB RAM on the Series S will be for apps, not games, they'll be reserving at least that much for the OS (I don't know how much yet, the One S was however 3GB). The amount of RAM difference I could foresee being the the only notable engineering challenge for some games (not ours), though that'll be the difference between like 2K and 4K textures, which is an expectation of the hardware anyway so there's an obvious approach there, coupled with smart delivery to only install the necessary texture resolution for the lower storage capacity.
Everything else is fairly standard. CPU difference is too minor to have any real impact and you probably won't even need to account for it. GPU FLOP difference will mean you'll need to be careful about fillrate. Both are things we already have to concern ourselves with for the PC itself due to the gigantic range in hardware (remember, just because you can release a PC game with massive high specs, that doesn't mean you can actually make it high spec exclusive, you will quickly find the market isn't there, "can it run crysis" is a meme for a reason). Hell even if you were just making an Xbox Series X/S only title, that's only two SKUs to test that are otherwise literally the same compile target. We don't really see a big deal.
Thank you for your input! Seems like work but not a huge setback, at least for you all. Appreciate the response 👌🏿
Very interesting, thanks for the update, seems MS engineers did their calculations well to limit the time studios have to spend to think about it. Now, as my question raised above : do you have any insight as to how it would work with less traditional rendering methods like what EPIC showed with UE5 demo? Does the workload on Async Compute scale just as easily as more « traditional » rendering?
Yeah, if you look at it that way, it seems almost decadent to pay 200 bucks more for a slightly higher internal resolution.
It's an attempt to anchor all the third-party console publishing on a cross-platform minimum requirement, to mitigate the contradiction of being simultaneously the publisher of Windows (and a publisher on it) and the owner of a separate console brand. And more specifically, to avoid a too slow replacement rate compared to the PS5 that would marginalised the platform.
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No catch, it's a reasonable compromise on IQ but one that would probably be visible on the right screens and at the right distance. Also, absence of physical drive and reduced SSD space account for a substantial part of the price difference as well. I do however think that 1440p is their optimistic target. It's 43% of 4k resolution (in terms of amount of pixels to push) while the GPU would return something like 33% of Series X power, so I rather expect things to float between 1080p and 1440p depending on the title.
How can you look at these specs and still think it's the same as series X with "just" lower resolution.
WTF.
You will have drawbacks everywhere. Maybe not at the start of this gen, but at some point, the difference will be as high as Xbox One and Xbox One X at with having lower textures, worse shadows, worse draw distance and more.
Do you think that the Series S will start strugging in a few years?
Of course, first party games will be fine as they can mandate native 4k on the X and downscale, what I am thinking is 3rd parties may target 1440p on Series X and PS5 then its going to be much harder to downscale.
Of course, first party games will be fine as they can mandate native 4k on the X and downscale, what I am thinking is 3rd parties may target 1440p on Series X and PS5 then its going to be much harder to downscale.
I'm going by Ms claims in their series S video.
I know the specs. It's why I'm questioning it.
It will struggle @ 1440p. It'll do much better @ 1080p, and in some rare cases it will have to go down to 900p down the line.
Think people should focus less on on native res. And for example the situation of PS5 and series x games at 1440p and what would it be then on Series S.
Next gen is gonna be even more checkerboarding, dynamic res and probably more DLSS kind off solution. So a Series S version can be in some time be 720p. But will use all kind of techiniques it kinda doesn matter.
Next gen is gonna be even more checkerboarding, dynamic res and probably more DLSS kind off solution. So a Series S version can be in some time be 720p. But will use all kind of techiniques it kinda doesn matter.
Probably literally the easiest version they'll have to do considering they can just scale it down from Series X and it's basically all the same code.
I never cared much for XBox but I think the Series S is a really smart move from Microsoft. This could fly off the shelves especially during theses times.
PS5 will look increasingly like PS3 all over again dependent on the price.
PS5 will look increasingly like PS3 all over again dependent on the price.
The Series S will absolutely be able to play games better than the XB1X can but that's not the same as being able to play XB1X games via backwards compatibility. I guess I could be wrong and the amount the XB environment has been virtualised is far greater than I thought but as far as I'm aware, it isn't as simple as flipping a switch to lower the resolution. Developers have specifically targeted XB1X specs, which means they will require the same amount of available RAM and the same memory bandwidth, neither of which the Series S will be able to provide.
Devs can definitely patch XB1 games to support the Series S, just like they can with the Series X, but any unpatched games will almost certainly run at standard XB1 settings. Though I guess there's the chance Microsoft's backwards compatibility team will go through the XB1 library and basically patch each game themselves.
That's actually going to be a very interesting question that only time will tell. Us personally have only tried to use async compute for decompression and post processing tasks (we have yet to go through using it because the performance gains have been marginal versus the potential cost in maintaining its support), things that would inadvertently scale with the resolution of your assets and output anyway. And I very rarely see any game use it for physics.
UE5 meanwhile is doing some stuff that I still have a hard time following myself, they have some real wizardry going on there. If they are very dependent on async compute for flat performance that doesn't scale to resolution, that could causes some limitations, but it's not like this GPU is weak. Don't take the TF at face value, like CPU clock speed they aren't a good standalone measurement of performance between different technology generations, Digital Foundry did a video on this. There is a non-zero chance that the Series S could even masquerade as a One X for backwards compatibility even with 2 TF less. Not certain, but heck only a few years back people were claiming the Xbox One couldn't emulate Xbox360 games, technology generation jumps do some weird stuff. Wouldn't be surprised if it just did One S though and Microsoft left it to developers to decide and patch, would be the more confidant option.
I'm curious to see how it'll work out and what challenges it'll face, but Epic already got this far and I can't imagine them not knowing about the hardware in advance, it should work out.
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I'm sorry but you are misinformed. The difference between the One X/S is far more substantial than between the Series X/S in every major area:
31% faster CPU for One X vs 6% faster CPU for Series X
4.6x TF improvement for One X vs 3x TF improvement for Series X
50% more memory for One X vs 33% more memory for the Series X
4.8x better memory bandwidth (1.5x better for 32 MB of ESRAM) for the One X vs 2.5x better memory bandwidth (6x better for 2GB of OS RAM) for the Series X
That isn't even taking into account any architectural improvements that the One X had over the One S.
Given the power of each console I think it'd be a waste of time if either company did a mid-gen update with better specs. It might take a few years really get the most out of the hardware, and by that point they might be ready for a new generation. But I guess that depends on where console gaming is at in a few years time.
I can definitely see a console redesign on the cards though.
I expect the 2GB RAM to be for the OS.
Series S eats current gen for breakfast.
I think it will be mandatory to support Series S and I trust Microsoft on this, that they build a machine capable of playing next gen games without holding the games back. If they wanted to just produce the cheapest console possible, SSD and CPU wouldn't be the same or similar with a lower clock speed on CPU.
RDNA2 is more RAM efficient.
With SMT PS5 sits in between Series S and X. 0.1 difference.
If you want to play the next battlefield and so on, you probably should. Series S has a much better CPU and a SSD. The RDNA2 GPU should provide better results and thanks to SFS, RDNA2 and SSD the console will be more efficient in RAM management. Thus the more and faster RAM of XBOX One X is arguably not or at least not a big advantage. Especially when you consider 4K has higher bandwidth requirements and you need more RAM for 4K textures.
He later said he talks about optimization, which makes sense. More platforms, more testing, ... .
Playground Games and other studios did develop for Xbox One X first and then scale down. Maybe a gaming developer can chime in, but iirc most games scale down rather than up. Games like BF are developed on high end PC first.
Sampler Feedback streaming. Don't mistake it with SF.Sampler Feedback is a huge deal.
Look how much VRAM it saves.
Sure. Custom part is about filters.
Thanks the the insight. Really appreciate those.
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It seems insane to buy the Series X. We all know that in a few years they will release a Series X S, or Series X X, maybe even a stronger version of the Series S too (Series S X?), so it would make a lot more sense to upgrade in a few years rather than swing for the more expensive version day 1 which will still not be fully utilized for years.
Eh, the Series S has 4TF while the Series X has 12.15
That's a 8.15TF improvement unless I'm missing something here.
With BC being pretty much the only reason not to use SMT I find it kind of weird to call the CPU of the XsS faster than the CPU of the PS5 while the later actually runs a bit faster with SMT on.
It comes across as being disingenuous I feel.
Edit: meant to say XsS instead of XsX.
3x as in 300%, though I guess it's closer to 304%. I should have just said 3x the TFs instead of a 3x improvement, sorry if that was worded poorly.
Does anyone if One X enhanced games and BC will work on Series S ? there has been no words regarding to this right?
Oh, now I see what you mean.
Still, just because the % improvement isn't as high as with the X, it's not like a 8.15 TF difference is like nothing. That's f'n huge.
And I don't know what else to tell you, just from experience alone in the last 20+ years of gaming, if you really believe res will be the only difference between them, no matter what Microsoft Marketing videos say, then you're a fool.
I'll actually bet that even on day one, at least one game in a DF like comparison will show graphical differences. If it's just the shadows, or the draw distance or some other missing effects, something will be there. This will happen faster then you'll think and over the years with even bigger changes.
And if it's "just" the res for a long time, then this is still a huge deal, as Xbox One X already showed me for years. Because even with a 1080p which I had until 2 month ago, super sampling is a f'n game changer, a system seller I would even call it. The difference it can make to picture quality is just insane with a lot of games. Some games look like f'n art paintings because there's zero.zero aliasing and it just looks magical.
So even for this alone and even if I would still only have a 1080p TV, I would be dumb to not spend the extra money on the base of the next generation, the platform on which I will play the next 3000 hours in hundreds of different games.
The base on which you play everything in the next few years is the absolute last thing you should be cheap on.
But that's just my opinion.
It is just a use-case of Sampler Feedback. https://microsoft.github.io/DirectX-Specs/d3d/SamplerFeedback.html
These custom filters make it a little more efficient, but will work on PC the same way.
Lol this is nothing like a PS4 Pro, the GPU is like 2 generations ahead in terms of it's feature set not to mention their velocity architecture.
TFlops aren't everything.
And then have to deal with all the "lazy devs" abuse when the performance isn't good...?
Yup and that's perfectly reasonable for a next gen console at $299 especially when you consider it will probably be $199 when games get really demanding.
No. Xbox Series S has DX12 Ultimate, hw Raytracing and DirectStorage support.
It's just similar in raw performance.
When the ability to load the content into the RAM is potentially faster than the XSX and PS5, I can't see that being an issue.
Do we know what resources chew into that 6GB vs 2GB? Could easily impact how many assets that can be loaded at once. Although i'm not entirely sure about this when there's the SSD being utilised also.
honestly it boggles the mind how some can make the jump that it's simply a "PS4" with an SSD 😂
Yes and why is this a issue? GTA will release on PC and speaking of PC, games scale between minimum and high settings. You don't need the same amount of RAM & bandwidth at @1080p and lower settings.
Nothing official. My guess would be 2GB are for the OS and 8GB for the games. We know Xbox Series X uses 3,5GB for game logic and so on. So my theory is Series S has basically 4,5-5GB as VRAM so to speak.
If history is anything to go by GTA will be designed for and come to consoles first. As far as I understand things, the amount of Ram is or has been an important factor in streaming open worlds.