Xbox Series X | S

[AI]

Pilotwings (When I'm) 64

[Uncle Mike]

10 minutes ago, Stanley said:

I’m not sure about that rumour and the reason is this; if Series X is cheaper than PS5 then why bother with Series S? Why not just make a Series X Digital? That way you’d undercut Sony on price for both their options whilst still offering the more powerful machine. 

 

Depends how much cheaper the S is, versus only a small difference when you cut the drive out. I expect the cost of the PS5 and PS5 Digital to be pretty similar. That might not be the case for Series S and X.

 

But it's worth mentioning that these recent rumours are only that (and, I think, fairly dubiously sourced.) We shall see how it ends up.

[footle]

37 minutes ago, Stanley said:

I’m not sure about that rumour and the reason is this; if Series X is cheaper than PS5 then why bother with Series S? Why not just make a Series X Digital? That way you’d undercut Sony on price for both their options whilst still offering the more powerful machine. 

because the series X, PS5 and PS5 digital are probably ridiculously expensive, UHD drive or no UHD drive. If your PS5 digital is $499 and your PS5 digital is $599, there’s a lot of space to undercut.

[Stanley]

4 minutes ago, footle said:

because the series X, PS5 and PS5 digital are probably ridiculously expensive, UHD drive or no UHD drive. If your PS5 digital is $499 and your PS5 digital is $599, there’s a lot of space to undercut.

Which leaves Series S as the only really affordable option, which seems like a good way in theory - massively undercut the competition yet still offer a high end option for those that want it - yet the danger is it’s quite a bit less powerful than the PS5, although we’ve yet to say how that manifests itself (whether it still has Raytracing, for example). 

[Uncle Mike]

If (as seems to be the assumption) the Series S supports all the same features, just at 1080p rather than 4K, I think it could be a really sweet next gen experience for many (no-one can tell the difference between 1080p and 4K anyway) - if it's very competitively priced. I don't have any understanding of what that has to mean in terms of hardware cost, but it feels like more than just taking a disc drive out.

 

I guess the only question mark over it is if developers start going 1440p or checkerboarding etc on 4K games, what that implies for the 1080p version. But if it's well-priced (and, I believe, MS are strongly pushing devs to do real 4K as a demonstration of the power of the X) then it could be a real opportunity.

[Broker]

Yeah it’s a day one sale from me if it plays next gen third party games at 1080p and is a decent amount cheaper.

[SeanR]

is the series S going to have it's own thread?

[monkeydog]

6 minutes ago, SeanR said:

is the series S going to have it's own thread?

Doesn't make much sense to do so if the only different resolution. Might as well just add  |S to this one. 

[Mr. Gerbik]

11 minutes ago, SeanR said:

is the series S going to have it's own thread?

"Thread X"

 

"Thread S"

 

Easy.

[mushashi]

1 hour ago, Uncle Mike said:

 if it's very competitively priced. I don't have any understanding of what that has to mean in terms of hardware cost, but it feels like more than just taking a disc drive out.

 

It has less RAM and a smaller SoC and possibly a smaller SSD too, should also need less raw materials and cheaper and weaker power supply/cooling solution. Is that enough to cut $200-300 off the price?, who the fuck knows.

[Popo]

Sorry if this isn’t exactly the place to ask this but  am I right in thinking that Game Pass doesn’t yet include the streaming component? I woke up with a hankering to play Halo and realised I never finished Halo 4 on 360... which I could fire up, but I’d rather play the more visually enhanced version if possible... but my laptop couldn’t handle it if it was a download, only streaming would work. So, I’m SOL, basically, right?

 

Edit - yes, seems this is the case. 

[layten]

36 minutes ago, Mr. Gerbik said:

"Thread X"

 

"Thread S"

 

Easy.

But how will people know which thread to use!

[Stanley]

They’ll all use the PS5 one instead 

[Revival]

But won't it be too noisy?

[Stanley]

Yeah there’s a lot of hot air 

[monkeydog]

52 minutes ago, Popo said:

Sorry if this isn’t exactly the place to ask this but  am I right in thinking that Game Pass doesn’t yet include the streaming component? I woke up with a hankering to play Halo and realised I never finished Halo 4 on 360... which I could fire up, but I’d rather play the more visually enhanced version if possible... but my laptop couldn’t handle it if it was a download, only streaming would work. So, I’m SOL, basically, right?

 

Edit - yes, seems this is the case. 

 

The PC streaming isn't out yet. Proper streaming launch is 15/09 but that might just be Android. You can download the beta android Gamepass app now and stream around 30 games, including MCC.

[Ferine]

55 minutes ago, Popo said:

Sorry if this isn’t exactly the place to ask this but  am I right in thinking that Game Pass doesn’t yet include the streaming component? I woke up with a hankering to play Halo and realised I never finished Halo 4 on 360... which I could fire up, but I’d rather play the more visually enhanced version if possible... but my laptop couldn’t handle it if it was a download, only streaming would work. So, I’m SOL, basically, right?

 

Edit - yes, seems this is the case. 

I haven't tried it myself, but in theory you should be able to install an Android emulator (like BlueStacks) then download the Game Pass (Beta) APK or grab it from the Play Store within the emulator.

[Mr. Gerbik]

1 hour ago, Stanley said:

Yeah there’s a lot of hot air 

It's also a lot bigger but we're all still there because it has the best posts.

[Jg15]

https://forum.xboxera.com/t/according-to-jeff-grubb-the-xbox-august-event-has-been-moved-to-september/2348

 

Rumors that the August Xbox event is moving to September, fuck sake another month to wait for price and release date.

[EvilBoris]

1 hour ago, Ferine said:

I haven't tried it myself, but in theory you should be able to install an Android emulator (like BlueStacks) then download the Game Pass (Beta) APK or grab it from the Play Store within the emulator.

Problem with blue stacks is that you can’t connect a controller to it via Bluetooth 

[EvilBoris]

4 hours ago, Stanley said:

I’m not sure about that rumour and the reason is this; if Series X is cheaper than PS5 then why bother with Series S? Why not just make a Series X Digital? That way you’d undercut Sony on price for both their options whilst still offering the more powerful machine. 

I think that the S is intended to be the model to serve countries and people where 4K isn’t a thing.

both companies still sell a shit ton of current Gen machines, this is an attempt to get those people into the new ecosystem in 2 years , rather than in 7.

Also , I think about my sister and her 6 kids, they play their Xboxes on crappy hand me down TVs from friends, what a waste of time and money a £500 machine would be for them generally.

 

[Thor]

11 minutes ago, Jg15 said:

Rumors that the August Xbox event is moving to September, fuck sake another month to wait and be told it still has no games at launch.

FTFY.

 

Sorry lads, just couldn't resist...

[Dudley]

I still think there's no way you can do a guaranteed 1080P system if it needs to do literally everything the 4k system does but at 1080P without essentially making it the same system.  There's just not going to be a cost saving.

 

The likelihood I imagine is it won't be guaranteed 1080P ultimately.

[Broker]

Surely you just build the same thing but with a cheaper GPU? Which given how ridiculously expensive they are is a big saving. 

[Hitcher]

But we don't even know what the Series S will be yet!

[mushashi]

11 hours ago, Dudley said:

I still think there's no way you can do a guaranteed 1080P system if it needs to do literally everything the 4k system does but at 1080P without essentially making it the same system.  There's just not going to be a cost saving.

 

The likelihood I imagine is it won't be guaranteed 1080P ultimately.

 

Given the history of platform holder mandates/requirements and public proclamations on technical performance related matters, that is a given.

 

The 4K boxes won't be universally True Native 4K either.

 

Some PC users are now falling over themselves to proclaim FauxK as the new hotness, so it really doesn't matter anyway.

[AI]

Native 4K is the best IQ (apart from 8K obviously), but failing to achieve that, what is next in best of IQ? 1440P with/without AA or 4K checkerboard?

[Stanley]

But you have people proclaiming DLSS (is that right) giving even better image quality at lower resolutions than native 4K. 

[footle]

9 minutes ago, AI1 said:

Native 4K is the best IQ (apart from 8K obviously), but failing to achieve that, what is next in best of IQ? 1440P with/without AA or 4K checkerboard?

 

Native 4K isn't, because you still have aliasing: that's what supersampling gives you, and DLSS replicates a bit.

Checkerboard is then worse than 4K because of motion artifacts. Whether you can see any of these from a standard console viewing distance is another thing entirely, of course.

[Stanley]

What does DLSS do, and is it an exclusive Nvidia feature?