Digital Foundry is here with its latest tech breakdown - this time for Teyon's recent shooter Robocop: Rogue City. We actually covered the Series X version's impressive performance gains last week from another analysis, so it's the Series S version that's caught our eye this time around.
First up - general performance. RoboCop: Rogue City only features one mode on Xbox Series S, but it performs rather well for the most part. You can see this Unreal Engine 5 shooter sticking to its 30FPS target most of the time in the video up above, and here's DF's quick summary on Series S performance:
"The internal resolution is also 1080p in the shots I tested, suggesting parity there as well. Frame-rates also don't differ hugely, with a fairly steady 30fps most of the time, down to the 20s in larger firefights, sometimes punctuated by traversal stutters in certain areas. These drops are rarely egregious, but you do feel those frame-time inconsistencies - especially given the lack of motion blur."
Despite solid resolution and frame rate figures, Xbox Series S does miss out on some next-gen UE5 features that Series X and PS5 contain. The biggest is the engine's 'Lumen' reflections system - making for some hugely different visuals in certain scenes. Again, here's how DF sums it up:
"We normally expect cutbacks on Series S, and here the most obvious is the complete removal of Lumen reflections in both glossy and semi-gloss forms, with a screen-space technique used instead. When the SSR is occluded, you do see a very rough impression of the scene color, which looks like it stems from the game's Lumen GI, but it doesn't match the environment nearly as well as the Lumen reflections."
We can't pretend that we understand all of the finer details from this DF tech speak, but it's pretty obvious from the Series S section of the video that Lumen's reflections make a huge difference. The Series S version looks good overall, but the comparisons show some vast differences!
Anyway, we're glad to see that the frame rate is solid on Microsoft's digital-only console, and that it can handle a UE5 shooter like this well enough. If you're playing on either Xbox console you should have a good experience - albeit a much shinier one on Xbox Series X.