What is it about the Xbox Series S that worries developers?

I think the 8GB is fine compared to the X's 10GB for game data, the smaller output buffer size will require less memory. I'm wondering why the OS memory size is so much different? 6GB vs 2GB, what more can the X do in terms of OS features?
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I had no idea XSS actually had a much, much slower RAM. That plus the lower RAM is going to be pretty bad, I think. This is going to hold back the game development scene, I think.
 
wow, it's like no one saw that coming 😳

To casual/whatever players: Huge performance for each buck

To developers/game enthusiasts : shit, we are fucked
 
I didn't realise the spec difference, I thought it was just a gpu with less cus at the same frequency but everything else was untouched.

slower cpu, less ram at a much lower frequency 8 GB @ 224GB/s and 2 GB @ 56 GB/s

the gpu is 20 cus @ 1.57 ghz

I can now understand why devs are frustrated with it / worried about it.

They should have done the same thing as Sony and just stripped out the drive and sold it at a loss.

Honestly ignore the graphical mess that was Halo, they have out of the gate hamstrung the xsx.

Look at the frequency differences here, game engines and developers will have to optimise for this and this results in time lost for development etc, Im sure all of them are right now middle fingering Microsoft, they already have tight deadlines and they have this to contend with and at the start of a brand new generation.

I cant believe they fucked it up this bad, its a pretty massive downgrade, if I was an xbox fan I would genuinely be upset about this.

I don't understand why the xbox fanbase are not fuming about this.

What we know is amd ray tracing improves with number of cus and with frequency.

The memory system is completely split pool the 56 GB/s can only be used for cpu / os tasks, its just too slow for any gpu related work.

Nvidia dropped a bomb shell with the new gpus actually releasing some awesome improvements for a decent price, bringing pc firmly back to top of the pack.

Microsoft are not making a loss with this console, this is probably going to be using the defective xsx silicon, where they drastically cut down the cus and reduce the frequency.

What happens in the next year or two where consoles typically drop down in price ? This is not long term planning at all, if they plan on dropping support for this 3 years down the line when the new xsx pro comes out, I can see some really irate owners of this.
 
Interesting. Once the consoles launch we'll get a treasure trove of debate on this topic as devs chime in more freely instead of code for concern.
 
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I wonder what his opinion of Nvidia and AMD releasing a wide range of low-end video cards for PC.

I'd rather they didn't.

We need more games like Crysis and Flight Sim 2020 that get people spending money on hardware.

High demand for high end hardware results in things advancing at a much quicker rate. Anemic CPU's in the current gen consoles along with AMD being retarded for a while allowed Intel to get away with a 7+ years of taking the piss. Nvidia have only just got off their arses because they want and needed something to smack down the next gen consoles.

Fuck being an apologist for low powered mainstream console hardware. If you're not Nintendo GTFO with that shit.
 
I wonder what his opinion of Nvidia and AMD releasing a wide range of low-end video cards for PC.

Pretty much the same, PC not being the land where most of the profits for many of these games comes from and you just work on the lowest common denominator and let your customers optimise the rest by playing with you user friendly build configuration quality options and brute force their way outwards.

Console development and gaming traded off a fully open HW ecosystem for the ability to target a fixed specs target and documented/supported low level access for enough time to make the investment work (console cycles being 5-6 years long when HW improved at a much faster pace for a console box below $800). Both users and developers were part of that tradeoff and benefited from it.

Making consoles the worst of both worlds: still a closed box where you cannot change CPU, GPU, SSD, etc... on your own for faster parts and hack with them too... closed walled garden/store too) and you have devs optimising for the lowest common denominator and not targeting much the HW you buy more and more for epeen/bragging rights than anything... see third party apps on phones and PC's and the use they make of the latest HW.
 
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I wonder what his opinion of Nvidia and AMD releasing a wide range of low-end video cards for PC.

A console is _not_ a general purpose computing device that can also play games those low end gpus are good enough for people to play games when they want to and on the pc, games like cs go, rpgs, tuirn-based, stuff like civilisation are popular these are not gpu intensive, they can be cpu intensive.

people and companies also buy low end gpus just to have a really smooth desktop experience as all modern desktops use gpu compute / acceleration for effects - this is not the same thing at all, most devs will even buy pretty decent discrete gpus, not for playing games but to offload any desktop rendering to the gpu. Discrete gpus have onboard ram, they don't need a pool of reserved system ram, which in a lot of the igpu stuff it does use a chunk of reserved system memory.

Also while we are at it, data modelling, cad modelling, video editing, artists etc they all use discrete gpus in PC because nearly all of them use GPGPU, hell most complex software will try and offload work onto gpus when the work load makes sense to be run on the gpu, this is why cuda and opencl exist

Consoles are designed only for 1 thing, purely for playing games. I don't understand why you guys keep misunderstanding this.

I mean come on Steam Top Played games:


446,953​
874,879​
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
284,179​
605,731​
Dota 2
108,201​
187,525​
Among Us
65,521​
105,024​
Fall Guys
64,507​
83,283​
Team Fortress 2
57,672​
76,444​
Destiny 2
56,077​
84,850​
Source SDK Base 2013 Multiplayer
52,282​
74,607​
Crusader Kings III
49,711​
96,836​
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege
47,720​
79,265​
Football Manager 2020

from https://store.steampowered.com/stats/

The only gpu intensive game on that list is Destiny 2 ffs and possibly rainbow six seige.

PC gaming is just different to console gaming, highly competitive multiplayer fps played at lower res and as high an fps as possible has always been the way to play, or playing strategy games that can take hours - I love civilisation, I have spent a good amount of time on cs:go I am not knocking pc gaming, but its usually very different to games I would play on a console.
 
I'd rather they didn't.

We need more games like Crysis and Flight Sim 2020 that get people spending money on hardware.

High demand for high end hardware results in things advancing at a much quicker rate. Anemic CPU's in the current gen consoles along with AMD being retarded for a while allowed Intel to get away with a 7+ years of taking the piss. Nvidia have only just got off their arses because they want and needed something to smack down the next gen consoles.

Fuck being an apologist for low powered mainstream console hardware. If you're not Nintendo GTFO with that shit.
No one is stopping devs to do such game, but it's a good way how to bankrupt game dev company. And for the MS, they are just creating some "Valve boxes" for their ecosystem as far as I can tell everything is developed on PC anyways, just scaled down so it would run.

I mean I am too dissapointed in XSS, but also telling people "get a second job"...whatever, I wanted to say something totally different.

I dunno, I am buying all of that shit, just not XSS. And I don't know if I even give a fuck at this point, just make some good shit. Make Control 2, inFamous Second Son, fucking Max Payne 4....something which is fun to play. I don't think that these machines are slow in any sense, devs are getting too comfortable to do cookie-cutter shit.

And besides "holding games back", we see more and more with newer release, that devs don't give a shit about base HW and targetting the "pro" versions anyway. Too much concern in bad place in my opinion.
 
It's been designed to target the same visual fidelity as the XSX but at a lower resolution. Where's the problem?

If MS have done their job right and allows devs to determine whether it's an XSS or XSX based on a simple flag, there should be no issues at all.
I hope this is not true cause you gonna go through 500 GB pretty fast.
 
Either Microsoft will have to develop tools that will make it easier for game developers to downgrade their games from the XB Series X to Series X, or we will see developers jumping ship to make more of their games exclusive to the PS5, especially if Sony is tossing the money around at them at the moment.
 
This seems so utterly pointless to fight over now. We just don't know.

Once DF comparisons, and others start rolling in, as well as honest, in-depth dev details and post-mortems, we'll be able to tell whether this system is a problem or not.

Right now, we have a tweet. That's fine for consoomers who spend their entire existence on gaming side attacking other consoomers, or running PR for their own consoles, but for the rest of us, it is direly lacking.
 
I see you somehow conveniently completely missed another dev elaborating on the Remedy dev's point and saying it was a big stink about nothing, but to vaguely paraphrase what the Remedy dev was getting on about:

-Another platform with different spec means more optimization time. Devs probably would like less optimization time, not more.

And...that's pretty much it. But the other dev who responded to the Remedy guy (speaking of, he's not an actual programmer, but just serves a Senior position as a team consulting lead or something like that IIRC; someone correct me if I'm wrong) said it was odd for them to be fussed about it since it's really nothing different from what developers have had to do for decades on PC and even between various console platforms with their own differences.

If the Remedy guy is referring to anything else it would probably be the SDK devtools not being ready or at mature enough state for what they are working on, and that actually fits some other speculation and rumors about parts of MS's next-gen Gamecore SDK not being ready thus making profiling for Series S on Series X devkits more difficult than anticipated. Whether this is still in the same state or has been fixed since then is unknown; I'd venture to say it's not as troublesome as it was, say, earlier in the year, however.
 
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Interesting. Once the consoles launch we'll get a treasure trove of debate on this topic as devs chime in more freely instead of code for concern.

I can almost 100% assure you that the XSS will be the anvil that holds XSX back and MS back from what "could" have been a great generation for them. We WILL view the XSS the same way we view Kinect with the launch of the Xbox One.
 
Those suits at Microsoft just took a shit on next gen in their greed for both price and power. They always talked about how they wanted to do away generations and here is their shitty plan. It has been proven time and again how weak base consoles limit what can be done to stronger consoles. The SeX will never reach its full potential. Looks like Sony exclusives will be the only true representation of next gen. Buy more developers Sony! Secure more 3rd party exclusivity! Developers please boycott having to deal with this shitty machine so it gets removed from the market!

In some games I could see development requiring more work. If they plan on releasing the game for PC, then I don't see a problem as they usually take into account much older hardware.
 
Meanwhile over at Sony`s, their worldclass first party studios are heads down laser focused on one fixed high spec. This is going to be interesting to watch.

This will be an epic battle between quality vs quantity.
 
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In game development you have to target the lowest denominator.

While titles exclusive to the Playstation 5 will take full advantage of the hardware, multiplatform titles as well as titles exclusive to the Xbox ecosystem need to scale back because of Xbox Series S. That is the reality.

It's kinda sad that we don't ever get to see those 12TF in action.
 
I honestly didn't think discussion could get dumber than Resetera, but there are a lot of lead paint eaters in this thread.

These posts will age like milk. All the concern trolling is frankly laughable.
 
I honestly didn't think discussion could get dumber than Resetera, but there are a lot of lead paint eaters in this thread.

These posts will age like milk. All the concern trolling is frankly laughable.
Imagine people who actually work in the industry their whole life being concerned and armchair videogame critics are saying there's no problem at all... It's like a doctor saying his has concerns about a patient's health and you read up a couple of medical articles and say there's nothing to worry about.
 
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No one is stopping devs to do such game, but it's a good way how to bankrupt game dev company. And for the MS, they are just creating some "Valve boxes" for their ecosystem as far as I can tell everything is developed on PC anyways, just scaled down so it would run.

I mean I am too dissapointed in XSS, but also telling people "get a second job"...whatever, I wanted to say something totally different.

I dunno, I am buying all of that shit, just not XSS. And I don't know if I even give a fuck at this point, just make some good shit. Make Control 2, inFamous Second Son, fucking Max Payne 4....something which is fun to play. I don't think that these machines are slow in any sense, devs are getting too comfortable to do cookie-cutter shit.

And besides "holding games back", we see more and more with newer release, that devs don't give a shit about base HW and targetting the "pro" versions anyway. Too much concern in bad place in my opinion.

Mate I wish everything was developed on high end PC's and then scaled down to run on consoles but the reality is that they usually use a PC target spec that is around where the baseline consoles are at the time. PC just ends up with higher quality assets/textures and lighting but games being designed around high end PC hardware? It's a rarity.

Games like Flight Sim, the original Crysis at the time, Escape from Tarkov, Assetto Corsa Competizione, Star Citizen. Yes some of those games can "run" on lower end hardware (and on consoles) but the experience is a compromised one. The games are fundamentally designed around high end hardware and its obvious to see. What we usually get on PC are console ports that use 10% of our CPU's and allow the gpu to chill at 60% utilisation even at max settings. I'd like to say that a lower spec "next gen" console won't hold things back but I'm comfortable in saying that if you buy a 3080 now you probably won't need to upgrade again for the rest of the generation if all you want to play are games that will also exist on console, there will be no reason to, nothing will push it.

Anyway, let's see what happens and how things develop as the game ration goes on. Like you, I'd just like to see some good new innovative games that are enjoyable to play and push the boundaries. I don't think I can deal with another generation of 50 ubisoft style open world game clones from AAA devs.
 
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I think the 8GB is fine compared to the X's 10GB for game data, the smaller output buffer size will require less memory. I'm wondering why the OS memory size is so much different? 6GB vs 2GB, what more can the X do in terms of OS features?
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might be for instant switching. I mean if the game has bigger assets due to 4k, the ram needed to store it needs to be bigger. While smaller res needs smaller space.

just speculating though so I'm not sure as well.
 
might be for instant switching. I mean if the game has bigger assets due to 4k, the ram needed to store it needs to be bigger. While smaller res needs smaller space.

just speculating though so I'm not sure as well.

I thought the slower ram was just for the OS? And that they've managed to get the footprint under 2gb?
 
Pretty much, if you're still playing on a 1080 television in 2020/2021 then crying that a couple games are 720p seems a bit absurd.

You think people won't notice shit 720p upscaling? 1080p on native 1080p screen can still look good depending on distance.

It's been designed to target the same visual fidelity as the XSX but at a lower resolution. Where's the problem?

If MS have done their job right and allows devs to determine whether it's an XSS or XSX based on a simple flag, there should be no issues at all.

Problem is 5.5GB usable RAM missing with 2x and almost 6x lower speeds...

Lazy dev doesn't want to do any additional work. It might take a week to optimize the game for the XSS. Boo fucking hoo.

You mean to redesign in some cases? "Next gen" has 7.5RAM pool as developers target, just ~2GB more than we have now, welcome to the future :messenger_grinning_squinting:
 
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And it looked absolutely disgusting
Yeah it does, it's on the switch. I have the opinion that porting Witcher 3 to the switch is a larger task than it's going to be for dev to get games running on MS consoles. They literally have an API that's purpose built for the task and series s gpu is feature complete. All the new consoles have upsampling/reconstruction hardware built right into the gpu. I would not be quick to dismiss what a difference that is going to make. The ps5 XSX are awesome and the little S is going to surprise some people.

But what's it matter, you and I aren't even getting one anyways..right?
 
I thought the slower ram was just for the OS? And that they've managed to get the footprint under 2gb?
Oh so what it actually means is that they've managed to make the OS size 2GB for both X and S? Is the spec sheet for the Series X one outdated?

edit: I kinda confused myself lol. It just means 2gb for os on the series x while still having some extra ram space on the slower ram. So games could still utilize the extra yet slower ram. While the series s slower ram is specifically just for the os.
 
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They put Witcher 3 on the Nintendo switch. 3gb of slow ass ram.... It's going to be ok

Terrible equivalence. Witcher 3 for Nintendo Switch is a port of the others consoles. This came after PS4/Xbox version, not the same.
You want the same level of argument? Think about Dragon Quest XI.
 
Single target optimisation Vs designed for scalability are intrinsically different approaches in how you deploy rendering resources.

Scalability primarily targets resolution and framerate, with less focus on other rendering innovations. Single target primarily focuses on maximising rendering features & complexity.

Recent proof in point, Nvidia marble demo. 3090 showing off gfx not at 8k/60, instead presenting 1440p/30 with unmatched scene quality only possible due to the specific target. Yes it's a demo, Nvidia doesn't make games - but games do use gfx.

A 4tf XsS vs 12tf XsX anchors development purely to a scalability approach.
 
Consoles aren't like gaming PCs you can just stick in another videocard and it works better. They do all kinds of optimization tricks to make games run to the best of their ability on the limited hardware.
 
That console is gonna get left behind so fast. MS gonna have people buying 2 XB in the next 3 years.
An S and 3 years later an X. Some lazy devs might just not even waste time on it and just make their games for X and PS5.
 
might be for instant switching. I mean if the game has bigger assets due to 4k, the ram needed to store it needs to be bigger. While smaller res needs smaller space.

just speculating though so I'm not sure as well.

No way they are going to have different assets. Textures and such are not determined by output resolution.
 
I can almost 100% assure you that the XSS will be the anvil that holds XSX back and MS back from what "could" have been a great generation for them. We WILL view the XSS the same way we view Kinect with the launch of the Xbox One.
Hold back from what though? 3rd party games will be the same as PS5. Exclusive games will also come to PC.
 
The Series S has less ram than One X. Would indicate back compatibility with One S only too.
One S and One X play the same game it just that One X games are 4k capable so with Series S not doing 4k why does that even matter if it has back compatibility with One X.
 
I think the 8GB is fine compared to the X's 10GB for game data, the smaller output buffer size will require less memory. I'm wondering why the OS memory size is so much different? 6GB vs 2GB, what more can the X do in terms of OS features?
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Good to see MS next gen OS can go as low as 2GB in use.

There were some concerns MS use of VM and BC would hoard up precious resources such as ram.

This puts another of those concerns to bed.

Great design beard guy made! :messenger_bicep:
 
Games with enhanced textures on onex won't load on series s due to less ram.
What that not how it works let me explained. When you play the backwards compatibility games on your Series S it will download that version of the game that will run on that system it won't just download a 4k game wile the Series S is not design to play in native 4k.
 
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Terrible equivalence. Witcher 3 for Nintendo Switch is a port of the others consoles. This came after PS4/Xbox version, not the same.
You want the same level of argument? Think about Dragon Quest XI.
I don't think it's a terrible equivalence at all.
My question to you is this, is it going to be harder for a dev to get a game that is developed for XSX to run on the series s compared to the witcher 3 port?

Porting games has been around since the very first consoles. I just don't understand the concern all of a sudden. Nes/Master system ports, snes/genesis ports, ps1/n64 ports, ps2/gamecube/Xbox ports.

Unlike those ports, devs will have same cpu, same gpu feature set, and wouldn't you believe they purpose built an API to handle a ton of the work. Yes, it would be easier if it were one sku but nothing new is being asked of these devs.
 
Oh so what it actually means is that they've managed to make the OS size 2GB for both X and S? Is the spec sheet for the Series X one outdated?

edit: I kinda confused myself lol. It just means 2gb for os on the series x while still having some extra ram space on the slower ram. So games could still utilize the extra yet slower ram. While the series s slower ram is specifically just for the os.

Yeh there's some extra leftover ram space on the Series X that devs can offload low bandwidth tasks (like audio for example) to if they want.
 
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