Topic: General Xbox Series S Thread

@graysoncharles I think it may have something to do with the game engine limiting optimisation a bit.

Does anyone know if the live gold subscription will work on the new series consoles? As I don't want to get game pass as I will be buying my games individually.

@Darylb88 among other things... there is also a ton NPCs on a large open world city map, which apparently is larger that the previous game. The graphics aren’t dazzling, but there is a lot going on. I get the “heavy” adjective.

Anyway, I’m not sure if a person playing on a 1080p TV is going to notice 900p that much. Sure, the drop between 4K—>1080p is going to be super apparent, but 1080p—>900p? If someone were that sensitive to resolution they’d probably have a 4K TV.

@Darylb88 It seems that the game is not very well optimised but because Series S has a good upscaler if you really want the game get it, at least you have options to boost performance or resolution even on Series S. You'll see more impressive stuff on Series S, I'm 100% sure. You'll see next-gen games running at 1440p and indie games above that (Falconeer).

@BazzaRFC Yes it will work.

@Darylb88 It would be better if it ran at 1440/60 on a Series S BUT like I said, the game needs an RTX 2080ti to do that and the Series S isn't that capable.

People focus on the resolution as if that is the only thing that matters in determining how capable newer hardware is. I guess its partly ingrained as that has often been the case with new consoles. The OG Xbox was standard definition, XB360 pushed resolutions up to HD (just) and the Xbox One is full HD. Just because 'X' game doesn't hit 'Y' resolution, that somehow means the Hardware isn't as capable as you hoped - but really it may mean the engine the devs used is not well optimised, that it takes longer to do the post processing for example than most other engines so they have to cut the resolution to reduce the post-processing time to meet the frame time buffer. They could be using higher quality assets, pushing a LOT more polygons around on screen which obviously takes a lot more processing power but also means they can't push the pixel count up - using the power in other ways.

The best way to look at any game is to compare how it runs on other hardware - same devs, same engine etc so the only difference is the hardware itself. Yakuza is running 'better' on a Series S than on a PS4 Pro and on an Xbox One X - both capable of running games at up to native 4k and the Xbox One X has more RAM available too - although the CPU is weak and the CPU is the brains, the area that tells the GPU what to draw, the area that 'normally' is used to calculate Physics, AI etc and everything, inc sending the frame to the TV has to be completed in 1/30th (0.03333s or 33.33ms) or 1/60th (0.01667 or 16.67ms) of a second - that an insanely small time frame to complete a single frame with millions of pixels...

@graysoncharles I suspect right now “somewhere in the middle“ is where the target will be. However, as the years go on, you’ll start to see the switch as devs get comfortable with the hardware and more first party games are released. It’s the gap year coming up though.

That said yeah I’m sure you do see a difference in 1440p—>900p but again that’s a larger push than 1080p—> 900p. But if that does bug you it is a turn based RPG so 30fps should be acceptable with very little hiccups.

Isn't it a known issue, when a new console launches, that the first games are not the best technically, with lower frame rate and resolution, especially cross-gen games? Assassin's Creed Black Flag is 900p30 on Xbox One, the PS4 version was the same but they patched it to deliver 1080p30. The new games that were not well optimised for the new hardware like Ryse: Son of Rome, looked incredibly good but had bad frame rate on Xbox One.

Series S warehouse picture:

@Kefka2589 Feel free too!

More details on the Falconeer - it doesn't have any texture maps at all - so maybe why it can hit higher than 1440p on Series S - not having to stream all those textures from RAM and obviously not impacting on VRAM too....

Not bad for just a single developer...

@Kefka2589 If you want to! haha

Things have been pretty quiet for series S marketing wise the last month...

@Kefka2589 I presume Watch Dogs Legion won't have RTX either, not sure why they advertised ray tracing if not even one of the cross gen games will run it in the launch window. Games will only become more demanding. I will probably get a Series X next spring.

@Kefka2589 DMC5 is also 1080p60 on 500$ PS5 FYI.

@Kefka2589 There’s a reason why more expensive GPUs surpass performance due to higher CU count, it’s just not about mere 4K resolution, it’s about the additional textures, special effects, high res ray traced AO, GI, volumetric shadows, DLSS/DirectML etc. which will absolutely require more CU headroom. Some next-gen optimisations like mesh shading geometry engine, VRS Tier 2, Sampler Feedback are necessary to free much of CU headroom and something which Capcom has said they are still scratching the surface of Scarlet generation consoles.

@graysoncharles “To better handle 4k” Except it’s only supposed to render at 4 times less pixels and targeted for different set of demographic. Also terraflops cannot be compared like that across generations. A 6tf GCN is actually weaker than 4tf RDNA2 with not only huge IPC improvements but also additional optimisations and features. According to the hardware team, Series S is designed in-line to deliver at 1080p/1440p optimised experience afterall. For good RT performance, even 36CUs is too less and do not provide desirable headroom without making other compromises (low res reflections with hybrid screen space solutions). But it’s targeted for a different set of casual market who will hardly care about Digitalfoundry analysis but just wants get into some casual gaming. Hats off to Xbox hardware team, they have actually made no compromises on things that actually matter (like CPU, I/O) assuring smooth performance for next-gen game designs without any noticeable difference to casual gamers. Rest of the graphical features will be scalable like it has always been for PC.

@Kefka2589 Okayy?!! 😅🤔

@graysoncharles “Flops are flops, no matter the architecture” Nope they are not. Flops don’t paint the complete picture in comparisons across different architecture types, in which something which takes X operation cycles might take way lesser cycles to do so in another more efficient architecture. It’s the reason why the Series X backcompat titles running on older GCN emulation is utilising the pure bruteforce of new generation while consuming less power wattages compared to One X but giving more performance results but titles like Gears 5 which seems to be have implemented some RDNA2 features is actually now drawing more power since it utilises the additional features and headroom for optimisations that’s left out by the previous “GCN emulation” titles on backcompat mode. This is the reason behind why numbers/second metric of one architecture cannot be compared with another as its misleading and the effective performance potential calculations are different for different architectures. Maybe @BAMozzy can throw some more light on this subject.

Also it’s not really absurd to expect next-gen games (most of them are far away) to absolutely optimise for entirely new architecture/platforms and lot of new performance potential that comes with it. Will expect this from first party studios as well as third party since lot of them (like EA) are already trying to revamp their engines for next generation.

Was able to get a pre-order for a Series S today, which I feel good about. I'm comfortable making the move to all digital but I was wondering of Microsoft has ever considered a disc to digital program like we've seen in the movie industry. I don't have a large collection of Xbox One discs but I would love to be able to just sell or store away my Xbox One for good.

I suppose eventually anything I have on disc may be available on sale, on Game Pass or as a Games with Gold freebie, but I'd be willing to pay few bucks from the get-go just to have my full Xbox One library on my Series S.

What are the rest of you planning on doing with your old games on disc?

@graysoncharles @Senua The Flops calculation is a theoretical maximum amount of floating point operations a GPU can do per second. Its based on the number of available shaders and how many cycles per second.

However, no GPU is 100% efficient and there is latency between parts. If its having to wait for instruction from CPU, that's some dropped 'flops' there, waiting for data from RAM, that's more flops dropped, waiting on another area to calculate something, more dropped Flops...

Newer architecture look at reducing the latency between everything so the GPU isn't waiting as long and look at improving the efficiency so that more of the GPU is working more of the time.

No GPU can get more out than is technically possible. The Series X cannot get more than 12.1Trillion Floating Point Operations, just like the Xbox One X can't get more than 6trillion but because of the efficiency and latency of the Xbox One X architecture, it may only be able to say do up to 3trillion because of latency and efficiency issues. Because the Series X has 'improved' architecture, its able to do up to 9trillion - 50% improvement over last gen because with the efficiency and latency, a 12.1TF GCN would be able to do about 6trillion Floating Point operations.

We tend to look at it from the wrong perspective - that the newer architecture is more powerful - that too match a newer GPU, you would need a more powerful older GPU (for example a 4TF new is like a 6TF old). Really, its more down to the fact that newer architecture is being used more of the time. Its actually getting closer to that theoretic maximum. GPU's don't use every single shader on every single cycle so its 'impossible' to hit that theoretical maximum - but it is possible to improve the efficiency (have more shaders working more of the time) and reduce the latency (the delay between sending and receiving instructions, data etc) to get closer and closer to that theoretical maximum.

Technically Flops are Flops regardless of the architecture - its a theoretical calculation. However, new architecture gets closer and closer to that theoretical maximum. Its all down to reducing the latency and improving the efficiency so that the GPU is performing more Floating Point operations per cycle than previous architecture...