It's been a while since we've heard any developers commenting on the Xbox Series S, but thanks to a new interview over at GamingBolt, we've got some interesting views to share on the future of Microsoft's system.
The outlet has been speaking to the game designer and producer on the recently released Caverns of Mars: Recharged, and he seems to be of the belief that the Series S may struggle in certain areas as the generation rolls on. That struggle relates to Microsoft's performance target for the Series S, which was originally set at 1440p resolution and 60FPS, and the dev appears to think that'll be difficult to maintain in the long run - specifically for graphically intensive games.
The Xbox Series S features lesser hardware compared to Xbox Series X and Microsoft is pushing it as a 1440p/60 FPS console. Do you think it will be able to hold up for the more graphically intensive games as this generation progresses?
“Short answer – no. If we take the (flawed) metric of FLOPS and compare Xbox Series X to Xbox Series S, you get a 3x difference in GPU computation power. Most of the current games use deferred pipelines, so rendered pixel count can translate to computation complexity pretty directly. Now, if we take the expected resolution targets for both consoles, we get a difference of 2.25x. Add that to lower available memory size, and it gets pretty hard to keep up.”
Of course, it's not all that surprising to hear the Xbox Series S may struggle to maintain its 1440p/60FPS performance target, as many AAA games on the market aren't reaching that right now - although they're usually not too far off.
The question is, what happens a few years down the line when AAA games have evolved even more and the Xbox Series S is still trying to push out 60 frames at a minimum of 1080p? That remains to be seen... but for now, we're definitely of the opinion that the Xbox Series S is still a fantastic purchase in 2023.