Digital Foundry has a Series S video up

Yes, thats good. The SeriesS is a smart and nifty machine will play next gen games great @1080-1440p, with VRS + DirectML to help on the really demanding games.

1 Like

I assume ya meant Series S… :wink:

1 Like

The problem with lockhart was never about technical feasibility of shipping something that works on it. It was always about “how much time will already pressured and overworked studios need to spend on making it a worthwhile experience.”

It doesn’t matter if this is how things have always been. Why maintain the status quo of wasting time on the min spec systems? It doesn’t matter if PC has had this issue for 30 years, when was the last time the recommended minimum spec system actually worked well? If it did work well, how much time was wasted making it so?

I would much rather their art and engineering departments spend their time elsewhere; not on making lockhart decent enough.

Maybe the tooling is good. Maybe the time is small. But making things work on lockhart is not zero time… That’s the point. Wish all studios would outsource their lockhart ports, there, best of both worlds :slight_smile:

Why is it going to take significant dev time to make an XSX game run on XSS? Just drop base res down and lower texture res. It isn’t tough to simply drop the asset res down. The tough part comes from having to figure out how and when and where to drop res usually, b/c ya are normally still targeting the same screen output. That ain’t the case here though.

Judging by the excellent work on the 1S + 1X, I have faith that the seriesS + X will be great consoles to work with.

So this guy is now saying that he has to target mechanical HDD’s for PC version of their game, but was whining about XSS setting a lower limit on baseline tech earlier in the twitter thread. >.>

It’s not “more work” though. It’s the same amount of work last gen except easier since the series s share the same ssd, near identical cpu, and all other hardware features.

Yeah, that’s the status quo that should be removed. It’s work that shouldn’t exist. Don’t waste time developing it, play testing it, tuning it, certifying it. Give it to some external studio to port if necessary.

Time would be saved if lockhart (or other SKUs) didn’t exist. Period.

Yeah, but devs then also have way smaller install base to sell to in that scenario.

I edited the quote

I have seen a few people raise the RAM bandwidth issue, and I wanted to address this...

  • XSS is targeted to being a 1440p console, and XOX was a 4K console. his means the assets will be smaller. Requiring lower bandwidth.

  • There are more use of compression to lower RAM usage and lower bandwidth across the whole system.

  • There is better compression such as use of BCPack, use of RGBE, DCC compression and others means that both the RAM requirement and bandwidth usage is significantly lower.

To address the other point, given the similarity of the two consoles (the IP are identical except for the size of the GPU and memory config), developing two consoles concurrently is cheaper than two independent development. Also as DF pointed out, the benefits coming from moving to a smaller node for shrink only is not as great as it has been in the past. Moore's law has indeed slowed down, the law states, transistor density doubled at a same cost every 18month - 2years. Well 7nm tech is significant more expensive than 16nm and 5nm is more expensive still and take much longer to fab the chips. This made it better to execute the strategy for two consoles and provide a much cheaper entry point from the onset of a generation.

1 Like

That logic could also be applied to the PS5. I mean, it’s extra work for devs right? Should Sony not make the PS5 to make it easier on devs?

What a weird argument. This is a business, not a public service/charity. Everyone is out to make money, including devs that complain about this.

2 Likes

Chatter by any concern trolls or even devs that haven’t fully worked with the target hardware yet is just worthless noise at this point. If Microsoft somehow missed the mark on their design and test assumptions with Series S when building these 2 consoles and don’t have the dev tools to make it simple enough for devs to deal with the Series S then it is all on them, but there is nothing at all for us to think that way yet.

3 Likes

Then useless comments. It’s like a guy who works in a fast food chain complaining about how he will build a plane…

Kirby0Louise

@Kirby0Louise

Developer of Void2D and Void3D game engines for Xbox Series X|S, Windows 10 and Nintendo Switch A zero hero! Louise on the outside, Kirby on the inside

github.com/Kirby0Louise

2 Likes

When thr 512MB RAM of X360 was the baseline, developers still managed to deliver games like Halo 4 or GTA V. If they can’t deliver a linear single player game with 10GB of RAM, maybe they have to reconsider their resources a little bit.

I say cut down the S version as much as needed. Of course, it’s always up to the devs. I doubt anyone spending $299, or less as time goes on, is expecting a premium experience. That’s why the X exists. I expect to S version to be good, but clearly a compromise. Are people expecting no compromises in a $299 box?

I know it’s portable, but for crying out loud people buy 3rd party games for the switch and some of the compromises there are brutal sometimes lol.

In a year or two people will ask whether it can play CoD etc and the answer will be yes and that will be the end of it for a lot of people.

One of those devs seems to have a history of disliking Xbox and being vocal about it. The rest all seem to have moaned about the Xbox One too. It’s just noise.

1 Like

Was kinda surprised to see them express the same “concerns” you generally see come from trolls and fanboy devs.

I’d like to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt here and think they consulted devs on this device before going full steam ahead with it.

I mean, developers have been developing for 5 console SKUs for the past 4 years, I would have assumed they’d be somewhat used to it by now? I mean, Microsoft might be giving them 2 SKUs, but at least each SKU has a fixed target to develop to that they’re in full control of

2 Likes

but that is not the world we are living in. shrugs.