Xbox Series X | S

[CarloOos]

I’m far from an expert, but beyond the obvious financial saving I just don’t buy the logic behind the Series S supposedly having less RAM. The levels/models/textures of each game are going to be the same regardless of whatever resolution it’s rendering, so wouldn’t cutting the RAM just kneecap the big brother?

[footle]

2 minutes ago, CarloOos said:

I’m far from an expert, but beyond the obvious financial saving I just don’t buy the logic behind the Series S supposedly having less RAM. The levels/models/textures of each game are going to be the same regardless of whatever resolution it’s rendering, so wouldn’t cutting the RAM just kneecap the big brother?

Have you ever wondered how graphics cards cope with varying amounts of ram?

you don’t need the same size textures loaded, and you create much smaller frame buffers, render targets etc.

[rafaqat]

2 minutes ago, CarloOos said:

I’m far from an expert, but beyond the obvious financial saving I just don’t buy the logic behind the Series S supposedly having less RAM. The levels/models/textures of each game are going to be the same regardless of whatever resolution it’s rendering, so wouldn’t cutting the RAM just kneecap the big brother?

 

Why would a 1440p console exclusively use 4K textures?

Different texture packs for different consoles.

Different amounts of the levels in RAM for each machine (might not matter too much if SSD speeds mean data can be loaded quickly)

 

[CarloOos]

You don’t need a 4k screen or rendering resolution to get the benefit of a 4k texture though, do you? That texture could be as large as a building or as small as a characters face, depends how you’re seeing it. 
 

To be fair I’d forgotten they’d pumped up the RAM in the One X as well. I’m not sure many games actually use different quality textures when playing on it though. I was mostly under the impression we were seeing extra detail that was already there from the improved resolution.

[TehStu]

1 hour ago, bear said:

Well that's nice. 

I have the EXACT same scales as Brad Sams. Who wants to touch me?

[Rev]

1 hour ago, CarloOos said:

You don’t need a 4k screen or rendering resolution to get the benefit of a 4k texture though, do you? That texture could be as large as a building or as small as a characters face, depends how you’re seeing it. 
 

To be fair I’d forgotten they’d pumped up the RAM in the One X as well. I’m not sure many games actually use different quality textures when playing on it though. I was mostly under the impression we were seeing extra detail that was already there from the improved resolution.

Cynically: Better texture detail is a pretty obvious demonstration that the expensive machine is worth the money. 

[footle]

1 hour ago, CarloOos said:

You don’t need a 4k screen or rendering resolution to get the benefit of a 4k texture though, do you?

 

If that texture is up in your face, you're not rendering any of the other ones, so the problem isn't there.

It's really memory savings on rendering though - you don't need 4k resolution renders, compositing passes etc. if you're targeting 1080p output.

 

Gears of War 5, ultra settings, 4k on my PC uses... under 5GB of graphics memory. There's plenty of room left to play with there if you're targetting a 1080p screen. Or even a 1440p screen.

[Liamness]

2 hours ago, CarloOos said:

I’m far from an expert, but beyond the obvious financial saving I just don’t buy the logic behind the Series S supposedly having less RAM. The levels/models/textures of each game are going to be the same regardless of whatever resolution it’s rendering, so wouldn’t cutting the RAM just kneecap the big brother?

 

Are they though? Very easy to imagine that developers would use different assets depending on the machine the game is running on. They already do that with this generation of consoles. Also, VRAM usage does scale with resolution to some degree.

 

The specs, if true, make a lot of sense. They can sell this to people who don't care about resolutions about 1080p / maybe the occaisional game that runs at 1440p. They will be able to undercut Sony on price, and also probably produce a console of a size that is going to be more palatable to a lot of consumers. Which IMO is an advantage they will need, as Sony have the advantage where content is concerned.

 

I'm going to do some price guessing  - PS5 and Series X both at $599, PS5 digital edition at $499, and Series S at $449. Both companies are playing a waiting game to see what the other does, but I think more than anything they know the pricing is going to disappoint people, so they mutually benefit from delaying it as long as possible because that's all anyone will be talking about once they announce it. They want to keep riding the hype train as long as possible.

[Corranga]

If the those specs are right, and the S is targeting 1440p that’s amazing, but no drive is a huge misstep for a budget console, especially if they want to stick with the ‘play all your existing games’ mantra. Budget gamers and digital purchases don’t go together. 

[Liamness]

Well from their perspective, they have to make the push for digital purchases at some point. And the best way to encourage people to go that way is to reduce the cost of entry. Its the razor and blades model, which is pretty much what the console game is all about anyway.

 

Ideally there would be some way to verify last gen purchases and get a digital back compat equivalent - but hard to see how that would work without a disk drive. Maybe you could mail the disks off somewhere to be shredded / recycled, as a one-time deal offered with every console purchase, and you'd get digital editions in return. A little far fetched perhaps, and potentially expensive, but could break even for Microsoft in the long run if they really wanted to push digital purchases.

[T Pot]

12 hours ago, CarloOos said:

I’m not sure many games actually use different quality textures when playing on it though. 

 

Quite a few. Smart delivery will only download the stuff for your console, so Base / S XB1 consoles I regularly see updates & install sizes being smaller than on my X. Also when you use one of those older machines and are planning on upgrading, you can tick an option to download 4K resources ready.

[Isaac]

9 hours ago, Freeman said:

If the those specs are right, and the S is targeting 1440p that’s amazing, but no drive is a huge misstep for a budget console, especially if they want to stick with the ‘play all your existing games’ mantra. Budget gamers and digital purchases don’t go together. 

 

Nah, they are pushing a digital subscription service, not digital purchases. 

 

The argument for budget gamers is subscribe for £8.99 a month to get access to over 200 games.

[footle]

Interesting that at "Hot Chips" MS have started claiming their audio core has "more power than"... all the CPU cores on the Xbox 1 X. Neatly paralleling the claims for the PS5 Tempest engine.

But it felt like they're both choosing a different metric. Feels like MS are playing catch up?

[Chooch]

Embarrassing things you don’t know - why does it take so much more power for 4K resolutions?

 

If Series X and S are showing the exact same graphics, with same effects etc but at different resolutions, what is the extra power doing?

 

Probably a very stupid question. Go easy.  

[footle]

2 minutes ago, Chooch said:

Embarrassing things you don’t know - why does it take so much more power for 4K resolutions?

 

If Series X and S are showing the exact same graphics, with same effects etc but at different resolutions, what is the extra power doing?

 

Probably a very stupid question. Go easy.  

 

Lots of operations are per pixel.

Every pixel means more memory, more data transfers, more operations etc.

[Petrousgyre]

Because we measure resolution on a single axis there's a tendency to think the number of pixels follows - a common fallacy is 2160p is only 50% more than 1440p. In reality though there's 2.25x more pixels.

[dataDave]

Here's a question:

What if you only want to play the Series X at 1080p, will it gain performance boosts over playing at 4K or will the visuals remain on par with the Series S?

[Alex W.]

If you had a 4K version of Mario Kart 8, in a 4-player split screen everyone would still have a 1080p window. That’s how much of a jump it is.

[Alex W.]

3 minutes ago, Fallows said:

Here's a question:

What if you only want to play the Series X at 1080p, will it gain performance boosts over playing at 4K or will the visuals remain on par with the Series S?

Hard to say. On PS5 some games will let you play in either a 4K mode or a 1080p mode. But I suspect it’ll probably just run at 4K and scale down to 1080p. That would act as supersampling anti-aliasing which would mean that the image would look very, very crisp.

[footle]

3 minutes ago, Fallows said:

Here's a question:

What if you only want to play the Series X at 1080p, will it gain performance boosts over playing at 4K or will the visuals remain on par with the Series S?

 

We have no idea.

It seems likely that some modes will be 1440p though - e.g. DIRT 5's 120Hz mode was announced at that rather than 4K.

[Chooch]

1 hour ago, footle said:

 

We have no idea.

It seems likely that some modes will be 1440p though - e.g. DIRT 5's 120Hz mode was announced at that rather than 4K.

Does that mean the Series S won’t have that mode then?

[monkeydog]

11 minutes ago, Chooch said:

Does that mean the Series S won’t have that mode then?

 

Most likely not, but it could have an uncapped variable refresh rate mode.  If someone's buying an S, it's not liely they'll have a 120Hz or VRR telly.

[Boozy The Clown]

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/us-retailer-lists-xbox-one-s-version-2/

 

Quote

US retailer Target has reportedly listed an updated version of Microsoft’s current-gen Xbox One S console.

According to a Twitter user, the One S “V2” was added to Target’s product system this week, with the same $299.99 retail price as the current One S console.

 

 

[Jg15]

No way they are releasing a One S revision at that price, sub £200 shirley?

[JPL]

Maybe they mean the Series S? It’s probably just bollocks though.

[Alex W.]

If that’s the RRP it’ll probably be available for a lot less online, and on past experience it’s probably a bundle with some game codes included.

 

I reckon the price of the revised console itself is probably only $199-249, but they don’t want as much of a gap between the cheapest system and the most expensive one, so they won’t actually sell a box with that price on it.

 

Edit - I’m picturing something like the last Xbox 360 revision, which looked a bit more like an Xbox One and cut back on some ports to reduce costs.

[Boozy The Clown]

I assume it is the Series S, but cannot be called the Series S just yet.

[MikeBeaver]

4 minutes ago, Boozy The Clown said:

I assume it is the Series S, but cannot be called the Series S just yet.

Yep, I'm with you on this one, been thinking about it, they said they were continuing to produce the Xbox One S into the future, but what if that's just them being sneaky and meaning that the One S becomes the Series S as the baseline machine, with the Series X replacing the One X?

[Alex W.]

Looks like there already is an Xbox One S V2, it’s just the digital edition. There are lots of listings online like this one:

 

https://www.game.co.uk/en/m/xbox-one-s-1tb-all-digital-edition-v2-including-sea-of-thieves-minecraft-and-fortnite-battle-royale-2652906

[Ferine]

Back in July Microsoft confirmed that they've discontinued the One X and One SADE, but that the One S would continue to be manufactured. As such I imagine that is indeed a listing for the One S, albeit probably with the newer controller packed in. I think the cost is just the current One S price, though. As in it'll probably go down once the prices for the Series line are unveiled.

 

Speaking of, one of the takeaways from that Hot Chips 2020 presentation is that the Series X is understandably expensive to make, comparatively more so than the One X which launched at £430; at best Microsoft broke even at that price. Given that they're keeping around a low-end option (One S), and will have a midrange solution (Series S) I can't see them eating a loss on the Series X: I'd definitely set aside £450+ if you're looking to buy.