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.
What are your thoughts on this? Let us know down in the comments below.
[source gamingbolt.com, via gamingbolt.com]
Comments 50
I wonder if as time goes on, developers simply skip the Series S. That would be a bit messy for Microsoft surely!?
@Bionic-Spencer
A game has to run on the Series-S too to be released on the store, like last generation they could not release a game that only runs on the One-X but not on the OG-One.
I'm curious to see what the first party titles look like and if it is just a case of folks not optimizing for the S. And if that is the case is it because they made it harder for devs to develop for it or is it just a pain because PlayStation is the default console they develop for and then port to Xbox?
I'm not techy so i don't know what goes into making games but I don't see a way that Xbox allows a game to skip the S. Conflicting reports from different devs about their love/hate for the series S. So make it work for both or it skips Xbox entirely. Also i don't think there will be any mid geb upgrades, they will just ride it out until the next gen.
But why it’s not an issue when developers have to optimize their games to lower-specs PCs as they’ve been doing for generations now?
I honestly don’t think the Series S is much of a problem, but it’s an extra step for developers and cost resources to optimize for that platform meanwhile something like the PS5 is more streamlined and that’s why developers mostly focus on that version.
I'm planning on trying to save for a Series X, or hopefully a cheaper discless version if they ever make one. As long as Starfield plays fine I'm not bothered about upgrading my Series S yet. @Wheatly I was thinking that's why Squenix is skipping Xbox because it's more work to get their games running on Series S and probably not worth the effort.
Uh-oh, here come the gamers who claim to understand game design better than the devs themselves....
@Wheatly PS5 has much more of a strict split for most of the memory between graphics and CPU usage, with not all of it shared.
While in the XSS/XSX, much more of it can be shared - so most of the RAM saving in the XSS could come from putting out 1080p rather than 4k on the XSX given it's 4 times fewer pixels.
So I doubt FF16 would have any issues running on the XSS if it ever makes it to Xbox, even though Square are often atrocious at optimisation...
Oh look. Exactly what I’ve been saying all along.
@IOI Lol if you've seen PC specs for games recently, some developers aren't exactly optimising for the lower end.
Forspoken is a good example where the graphics card requirement for the recommended spec was considered insanely high.
But yes most developers optimise for multiple levels (particularly the set Minimum, Recommended and Ultra specifications they provide) so you'd think a second console spec isn't too bad given it has most of the same components as the XSX.
I've got an XSX, but I find it particularly galling when some developers call out the XSS then do a PS4 or Switch port too...
Use reconstruction algorithms (which will improve overtime). Eventually, people on the S will have to except 30fps in some cases. Or locked 40 fps and more set will have 120 fps modes.
@Wheatly Yes but console systems act more like shared graphics on PC, with higher-speed memory that's available for both the CPU and GPU.
On PC, a dedicated GPU memory is usually higher bandwidth so shared is usually bad, but consoles often have much higher base RAM bandwidth to compensate.
So that split, plus no full Windows operating system in the background (and all the junk often running on PCs) should allow the XSS to compete for a while yet particularly at 1080p given it's 4x fewer pixels to render and hold.
Overall, the developer here though does have a point - for big, open world games with high graphics, 1440p is probably pushing it for the XSS - but 1080p should be doable for most games.
I love my series s, but I’ll definitely be upgrading to a series x (and selling my ps5) in the next month or so. I think as an entry level machine to Xbox gaming or as a cheaper option for younger gamers it’s absolutely brilliant.
@Bionic-Spencer they can’t. MS has a policy so that games have to be released on both S/X. It’s a policy I feel they should review sooner rather than later. Let developers decide if they want to put the extra work in or not.
The Xbox Series S, everyone's favorite scapegoat
@Wheatly True we'll see, but when I'm seeing a game as complex as Hogwarts Legacy playing fine on the XSS, I'm inclined to believe it'll be OK.
I mean Hogwarts is an open world with no loading screens except for the odd second delay, and huge areas - it's actually probably the first game I thought was truly next generation "feeling".
I've no idea how they'll get it working on the PS4 etc but if they do I'll be seriously impressed, let alone the Switch!
A few complainants probably do have real issues such as poor engines that struggle to scale, but many probably prefer Playstation (not surprising given the PS4 dominated the market) and don't seem to complain as much when they're doing previous generations or even the Switch.
I'll always remember the Godfall developers for example - "it needs the PS5's power and SSD, you can't scale that stuff" with it then releasing on the PS4 and Xbox One...
I do wonder as games become more graphic intensive if the Series S will be left behind, I got a series X because I didn't want to worry about games not running at it's best possible potential and I worry that the S might have the undesirable effect of holding games back due to developers having to get a game that works great on the S when really they could have spent all Thier time making a beast game for a more powerful console. I hope I'm making sense haha.
These naysayer devs are just living proof of how lazy programmers have become these days...
Is the Series S the top of the line hardware right now? No, but much in the same there are many games that struggle to maintain native res @ 30 even on the series X (cough Elden Ring cough) as proof no matter how much power you throw at a dev team, if they don't invest time into optimization the game is just gonna run bad, end of story.
My take is simple: if pretty much every first party title can pull it off, and third party greats like Hogwarts Legacy can do it on the hardware, then maybe it's time for devs to just stop being so lazy and blaming hardware that's pushing out more tflops and faster CPU than what was required to run Titanfall 2 at 60fps with an internal resolution of 6K being downsampled to 4K
Its been said lots of times and its not an issue that's going to go away.
I believe that for some publishers it stops them wanting to publish on Xbox. Splitting the skew has never worked for any previous machines and we can start to see why. The problems will only get worse as this generation continues.
Microsoft got some early sales from it, and they are categorically after GP subs, they wouldn't even offer a box if it were feasible to drop that at this stage. They wont care that many top AAA titles wont release - they were never coming to GP anyway and that's all they really care about.
People trying to equate different game engines and different platforms are obviously not equipped to understand the issue.
I understand, its disappointing, but its reality.
Most games from most publishers will run Ok, and that will have to be enough.
@Kaloudz I think realistically everyone should be looking at the Xbox Series S as a 1080p, 60FPS console in 2023.
It obviously has the potential to go higher or lower, but that's generally where we are with most mainstream games right now.
And that's OK! For the price, it's totally reasonable. The question is whether we're going to be looking at far more instances of 30FPS-only games in the future...
I have a series s and I don't expect to have 1440p 60fps games, it's advertising speach to sell consoles, I expect 1080p 60 fps with variable résolution with demanding AAA games, that' s more in line with what this console can do.
He's comparing it to 1440p / 60fps with the same presets though.
The reality is many Series S games are both lower resolution than that AND have lower presets. There is room for manoeuvre.
@NeutronOverload are Larian lazy? I don’t think so. We already have one real world example of a game, Baldurs Gate 3, that has been pushed back on Xbox because of the constraints of the S.
Again, if you are targeting 4k/60 on Series X, 1440p with the EXACT same settings is a 'stretch' for something with effectively 1/3rd the Computational power.
However, you could 'dial' back some settings - to free up a bit more resources or 'reduce' resolution - somewhere around 1296p is about 1/3rd that of 2160p and we know 1080p is exactly 1/4.
Point is, you'd need Series X overhead at 4k/60 to offer 1440/60 with the EXACT same settings because 1440p is nearly 'half' the resolution from something that's only a 'third' as capable.
Instead of trying to hit '1440p' with the same settings, optimise and if necessary, use a lower resolution and/or lower settings. MS stated 'up to' 1440p - which maybe achievable if you use 'lower' settings, reduce draw distance for example as distant objects at 'lower' res look 'blurry' anyway so maybe reduce LoDs and/or draw distance, drop shadow quality etc and maybe can hit 1440p or if you want to keep the settings, drop the resolution down - 1080p is perfectly acceptable for 'MANY' who connect to HD TV's anyway.
I still think MS should have marketed more as a 'HD' Next Gen Xbox that can offer res up to 1440p if you use a 1440p monitor and then 'no-one' would be concerned about its specs - and arguably then be 'punching' above its weight because a lot are above HD res...
@FraserG couldn't agree more. I bought the s for my son cause his tv only supports 1080p so there was no need for a console that outputs higher than that.
@JON22
If a game can run on nintendo switch then Series S shouldn't be a problem.
@Fenbops it sounds like you're referring to issues with the hardware limitations, I would assume memory availability, my comment was more directed towards the OP stating that the problem was with getting titles to run at 1440 @ 60fps which, frankly, should not be that difficult to pull off; if you can get the game running on the hardware in the first place and are hitting performance issues, with most engines available now it should be a relatively simple matter to downsample geometry, texture resolution, draw distances or whatever the major bottleneck is to be able to hit the target.
If it's an issue of "can't even get it to run" due to the lower available RAM or something, that one makes more sense, and I do really not get why a next-gen console was kicked out the door with less available memory than its predecessor, though again the main thing that's going to consume memory faster than anything are audio/visual resources, and if you could put together all the textures and shaders at high resolution then you don't really have any more work to do; it's a lot more work to create a "higher res" version of a texture than to just "scale down" what you've already made... pop them into photoshop, run a 50% scale-down batch and save them with _low in the filename and plop one line of code into anywhere textures load: IF (console == 'SeriesS') { texturename = texturename & "_low" } ... done.
I thought sss target was 1080p not 1440p?
@Widey85 Let's be honest, is mostly Square Enix and Sony that are just demanding octocores, 4080s, and 128hb ram in their PC ports of PS4 games though... Most pc-first devs are optimizing for varied builds.
Coding is hard Mmk. We don't want to code for optimization Mmk. Unless it Nintendo Mmk.
Wonder if these developers have problems with the switch, seeing as this game is coming on there as well.
Not a peep.
If you can scale for PC and have multiple variables there, if the work is put in, you can optimize for Series S as well.
How many SX and PS5 games even manage to hit their performance targets of 4k/60fps??
As it is, most Series S games have been 1080p, not 1440p, and either entirely lack 60fps or offer something near 720p to hit the 60fps, and think everyone is fine with that, given how cheap the hardware is.
Honestly this whole generation is already a bit of a bust, but so is every single generation, it seems. Previous generation promise of 1080p/30 was not a consistent thing either, one of the many reason for Pro consoles to be introduced.
Honestly, the fact that we have to pick between high res or high framerate is part of why I give a lot of credit to the idea of a mid-gen power refresh. I love my Series X, but really would love to have both, 4K AND 60fps (really don't care about raytracing.)
@Widey85
There are good examples out there, but Forspoken isnt a good example... of absolutely anything.
I always thought the S stood for “streaming,” personally. With mine, I just use xCloud for every game I play and that works fine. Plague Tale 2, for instance, seemed to run better via streaming that downloaded onto the console.
Decent developers won’t have any issue optimizing for series s, even towards the end of this generation. Lazy devs will be the ones who’ll complain. Release buggy trash at your own peril.
A developer for an Atari 800 remake game is concerned about the Series S not being powerful enough... Hilarious.
Should have saved this article for April first.
That's sucks to hear i though microsoft have made their new devs kit easier for them to achieve their goal i personnally don't believes those devs i'm sure they can do better, i will keep my series s this gen.
@IOI While scaling for lower end PCs is a valid point there also isn't a 'hard-coded' minimum spec with a pre-defined performance target that a game should meet for PC games. Minimum recommendations vary from game to game and a PC that may meet the minimum requirements for some games won't necessarily meet the minimum requirements for other games and the performance levels may also wildly vary.
@Kevw2006 That's the part people are missing. If a game on Steam doesn't run on your PC, Valve doesn't care. Nothing stopped the developer from releasing on Steam for PCs that can run it. Newer PC releases are finally starting to really want Ampere and Lovelace cards, so the gap is getting a lot wider than it has been during the heavily cross gen years.
@NEStalgia Target remains 1440p/60FPS according to the official Xbox Series S FAQ:
"As Xbox Series S was designed with a performance target of 1440p at 60 FPS with support for up to 120 FPS, many games won’t require their highest level of 4K textures."
https://support.xbox.com/help/hardware-network/console/xbox-series-x-faq
@Murray I think it's funny when certain DEVS complain and other DEVS actually put in the work to optimize and say the series S is not a hindrance to game development. I genuinely hope to see DEVS putting in the work for the console. I am a series S owner and so is my wife and we both love the console very much & have been blown away by what it's capable of so far. I don't think we've even seen games take advantage of everything it has to offer yet TBH. I also own a PS5 & I don't think we've even come close to seeing what the XSX and PS5 have to offer simply because cross gen games don't count. I'm not talking about 4K resolution or 60fps I'm talking about next gen gaming engines that simply can't run on last gen consoles (I know most engines are scalable but I want to see things that aren't even scalable to last gen).
The series S is more powerful than people realize. We have to understand that most anything developed on series X can be scaled down to run on the series S. I hear ppl whine about GPU but in reality that's not really the bottle neck as assumed because the series X is designed to run games at 4K resolution with 60fps and ray tracing it absolutely NEEDS the extra graphical grunt but when running games at 1440p and 1080p you realize that the series S GPU is more than capable. The series X|S have more in common with one another than they do differences & I've read from certain DEVS that bringing games to Series S is extremely easy but it does take time and if DEVS take the time to optimize for the console I think there's a lot of performance we can see out of the series S.
Happy gaming ✌️
If Cavern of Mars can't run properly on Series S, it is definitely not the console problem.
Developers should learn to optimize their games.
@FraserG That's crazy! It's always been the 1080p console and I've always thought 1080/60 was a gift, not below expectations. This is a case of over ambitious expectations. It's a very fine 1080p box though!
lazy developers always blame xbox series s as scapegoat, while they can run their games on nintendo switch just fine. ain't nintendo switch holding back???
@Bionic-Spencer Microsoft dont allow for it so its gonna really get messy when devs skip both. Ok, im scared now!! The BuyBack of the S is gonna have to happen on some level. Cant afford for 3rd parties to skip the entire platform
@Fenbops Im wit you on that but whats interesting as what happens when devs all skip the s. Its just becomes a literal game pass box or 1st party only box
the question was purposedly framed to get a no answer. click bait journalism. They asked if the games will do 1440p60 on series s which it wont it doesn't really do that now of course the answer will be no
now ask them will it just play the game at 1080p30 the answer will be yes
I love that xss is forcing devs to actually optimize their games
As an xss owner I prefer MS released a cheaper discless version of xsx instead of xss.
Sony got it right.
@IOI this is exactly what I was going to say. Developers have been developing for the worst case scenario in the best case scenario on PCs for eternity. There’s no excuse not to be able to dump down resolutions and graphics in order to get it to run on that system. do developers want to do that? Probably not, but Microsofts SDK allows them to easily optimize for both systems.
The developers that don’t want to do this, are just lazy. Because how hard is it to implement hidden PC like sliders that allow the developers to simply change resolution and graphical features until they get a locked 30 or 60 frames per second. This may already be implemented in Microsofts SDK. Again, there’s no difference between this generation, and last… Between the Xbox one and one X.
And again, something that’s been done by every developer on the PC for how many years? Just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Because if they make the game for the PC, which most games do end up there… Then they have to optimize for again… The best and worst case scenario in PC hardware.
so Caverns of Mars: Recharged devs cant get 1440/60fps on series s? DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD
ist a retro 2d game....
"somethings went wrong" in that Caverns....
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