Digital Foundry has a Series S video up

[Zappy5]

@Shpeshal_Nick

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

Be nice if some devs who have been working on the S dev kit came out and talked about it. I’m assuming a lot must have to get launch games ready for it. The ones commenting on Twitter all don’t seem to have and all seem to have some historic beef with Xbox.

[LifeForms]

To put things into perspective

Here is a hd5570 1gb GDDR3 card, it has 520gflops just over 1/3 the X1S gpu and under 1/3 of the PS4s GPU.

despite its vastly inferior vram it stills plays current gen games ok.

AMD HD 5570 in 10 Games || (2019-2020)

[Biggzy (Hassan)]

@zhus

…oth 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.

Thanks for bringing this up, it is appreciated.

I was basing my assumptions about memory bandwidth and amount on the One X and the Pro. Microsoft added 4GB to the One X on the basis for the 4K frame buffers and 4K textures, so I thought it stands to reason the Series S should have 4 GB less than the Series X.

In regards to bandwidth I am aware that DCC was already available for the Pro consoles, but the memory bandwidth to me seems too close to the PS4 Pro which is really a 1440p machine and that is why I think the memory bandwidth should be higher as a cushion really.

However, if there are other ways to save bandwidth then I guess we will wait and see.

[LucasTaves]

@LifeForms

Yeah ive seen them to, devs from ID software and one from infinity ward are worried about tge ram, the thing is it looks like there saying this as if they dont know and presuming these things based on on paper specs. Im sure once they get there hands on the hardware all will be fine, the 1X had about 45% more ram and was not an issue for the other consoles.

If ram is an issue it will be for all of the current gen consoles not just S.

Though both Ms and Sony have made a heavy case of how they deliberately went with less memory than what was actually needed with the trade off of a fast ssd to quickly replace the ram contents on demand.

It remains to be seen how easy it is for devs to use it, but it’s something that you have to have hands on as something like that is not even available on Pc space yet.

[LucasTaves]

@Biggzy

To be fair I do feel the Series S could have done with 2GB of more RAM to really make the scability from Series X to S as smooth as possible due to the fact the 4 extra GB of the Series X would be eaten by the 4K frame buffer and higher resolution textures.

However, overall this coming gen is not providing anywhere near the increase in RAM we got this gen. Stuff like SFS will certainly help and SSDs mean developers don’t have to hold as much in RAM as a streaming buffer essentially, but we are not going to have the dramatic increase in animation, world density etc that we got this gen regardless of the Series S.

I think we’ll get a way higher density increase to be honest.

Both HB2 and UE5 demos showcase that, if the game has enough resources to create the assets there is now support to showcase those assets in the highest fidelity available.

[LifeForms]

The UE5 demo does not look all that impressive, it just looks like a quixel demo, which looks amazing but it was weird watching people act like the UE5 demo was some new impressive visual paradigm.

[Pryme]

@rboxman

…s 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

I think this is a clear example of why CEOs earn so much more than devs.

Yes, you’d have to do more optimization to scale down games to Series S. Yes, that optimization will take time. But that’s not a painful, thankless job. The benefit of the Series S is a significant expansion of the consumer base by targeting cheaper price points. So the small additional work would translate to increased sales. Which translates to more money.

Random devs talking about ‘additional work’ aren’t seeing the big picture at all.

Imagine an ID dev complaining about optimization time when his company is working to put Doom Eternal on the Switch - to make more money.

[SilentSpark]

I’m gonna paste my reply from other thread:

Just to give some context to the ID soft dev complaints, before the Nvidia 30 series reveal the guy suggest to buy the card with more vram and after the event complaint about the “low” memory on 3070-3080… so I think it’s just because his design philosophy and personal opinion, but in the end the S is gonna be fine just as the 3070.

[Ruthwik_Rao]

@LifeForms

The UE5 demo does not look all that impressive, it just looks like a quixel demo, which looks amazing but it was weird watching people act like the UE5 demo was some new impressive visual paradigm.

I understand what you mean, but this is the problem with tech demos being advertised to everyday gamers. It was more meant for developers and artists than gamers imo. The point of it wasn’t that what you’re seeing is something truly mindblowingly next gen, it was the fact that artists and developers had far fewer roadblocks to achieve the same results that they used to get with how the asset pipeline shall now become less worried about polycount and all that and just skip some crucial but extremely tedious steps in the process like baking and LOD creation and all that. That was Nanite tech, the other one being Lumen, which shall make lighting simpler for game artists and developers as they now don’t have to worry as much about placing light probes all over the place and try their best to approximate global illumination, when now it was much simpler.

The demo was hijacked by PlayStation to somehow become about what that console can do when it’s more about what UE5 shall do for developers, PS5 just marketed this very well to seem like they had any kind of exclusive input on this tech.

[Biggzy (Hassan)]

@Ruthwik_Rao

I understand what you mean, but this is the problem with tech demos being advertised to everyday gamers. It was more meant for developers and artists than gamers imo. The point of it wasn’t that what you’re seeing is something truly mindblowingly next gen, it was the fact that artists and developers had far fewer roadblocks to achieve the same results that they used to get with how the asset pipeline shall now become less worried about polycount and all that and just skip some crucial but extremely tedious steps in the process like baking and LOD creation and all that. That was Nanite tech, the other one being Lumen, which shall make lighting simpler for game artists and developers as they now don’t have to worry as much about placing light probes all over the place and try their best to approximate global illumination, when now it was much simpler.

The Nanite tech is very impressive. The detail in some of the scenes were a clear generational leap compared to what we have now.

I did amuse myself that people used it as something that could only be done on PS5 when UE5 is a mulitplatform engine lol. However, it cannot be denied that it was smart marketing to attach the PlayStation name to the demo and that was the reaction Sony wanted.

[LucasTaves]

@LifeForms

The UE5 demo does not look all that impressive, it just looks like a quixel demo, which looks amazing but it was weird watching people act like the UE5 demo was some new impressive visual paradigm.

It was kinda of a new paradigm. It looked like a quixel demo but the point was that you could throw the highest quality versions and the engine (using the hardware features available on new consoles) will find a way to render that.

We also finally got a point where the hardware is flexible and powerful enough to throw a high polygon mesh and the gpu is able to render the appropriate amount of polygons.

So I think this gen will offer a insane jump in geometry density and texture resolution compared.

[CallMeCraig]

@LifeForms

The UE5 demo does not look all that impressive, it just looks like a quixel demo, which looks amazing but it was weird watching people act like the UE5 demo was some new impressive visual paradigm.

The UE5 demo with nanite is a complete paradigm shift in handling geometry. It was very impressive from that standpoint.

Sadly Epic didn’t share the numbers for the size of the complete demo and gigabytes streamed per frame. This would have been interesting information for judging how the demo would map to a real complete game.

[Whistler]

I wouldn’t worry so much about those developers, they’ll deal with it. Of course they want more/faster ram, it makes their job easier the less they have to optimize. They’d ask for hundreds of GB of ram if they could get it.

Yes a $299 console is going to “hold back” a $499 console in the same way a $499 console is not a $999 console. We’re going to get disappointing games on all of the consoles no matter what, we’ll live.

[Dreams]

The current narrative intended to kill Series S hype just makes absolutely no sense to me. Series S won’t be able to run BC games? How is that even possible? One of Microsoft’s biggest selling points across all their consoles not just next gen is BC. Why in the world would they make a console not capable of BC?

If the concern is it won’t be able to run XB1 enhanced BC games that also doesn’t make sense seeing as the console has already been confirmed to upscale to 4K (Checkerboard) if plugged into a 4k set.

Stop the nonsense and let Microsoft enjoy their positive fan feedback. Its crazy how the entire internet goes out of its way to bring us down smh

[SheepDip]

I would like to know the specifics on BC performance, just because after I pick up a Series X this fall, my current One X will become my secondary Xbox. At some point I’ll likely replace the One X with a Series S. It would be nice to know, should I expect the Series S to perform the same or better in all circumstances, or is it more complicated than that. If so, fine, I just want to know.

But yeah the concern trolling over Series S is out of control. People absolutely aghast that the Series S won’t play games at max resolution like the Series X does. I mean-- yeah? That’s literally the entire point of this product’s existence?

[Dreams]

@SheepDip

I would like to know the specifics on BC performance, just because after I pick up a Series X this fall, my current One X will become my secondary Xbox. At some point I’ll likely replace the One X with a Series S. It would be nice to know, should I expect the Series S to perform the same or better in all circumstances, or is it more complicated than that. If so, fine, I just want to know.

But yeah the concern trolling over Series S is out of control. People absolutely aghast that the Series S won’t play games at max resolution like the Series X does. I mean-- yeah? That’s literally the entire point of this product’s existence?

Xbox can’t have nice things. Keep your foot on their necks Phil!

[LifeForms]

@CallMeCraig

The UE5 demo with nanite is a complete paradigm shift in handling geometry. It was very impressive from that standpoint.

Sadly Epic didn’t share the numbers for the size of the complete demo and gigabytes streamed per frame. This would have been interesting information for judging how the demo would map to a real complete game.

Im talking about from a pure visual perspective. It was no more impressive then quixel work in UE4. its great that the technology is more efficient, but the people who were saying its better then anything we have seen before dont make much sense when we already have quixel demos on a 1080ti.

[SheepDip]

So it’s confirmed now that Series S will not apply Xbox One X enhancements to backwards compatible XB1 games. As expected, within minutes the Resetera thread has become a swamp of concern trolling and fake outrage.

[javycane (Javier Ruiz)]

@SheepDip

So it’s confirmed now that Series S will not apply Xbox One X enhancements to backwards compatible XB1 games. As expected, within minutes the Resetera thread has become a swamp of concern trolling and fake outrage.

So the usual over there. Shocking that a box that doesnt output 4K doesnt use 4K assets.

[WhiteDevilMan]

@SheepDip

So it’s confirmed now that Series S will not apply Xbox One X enhancements to backwards compatible XB1 games. As expected, within minutes the Resetera thread has become a swamp of concern trolling and fake outrage.

I guess I would want to know more about how the X enhancements will (and won’t) work. If it’s “only” the 4k assets on a 1080p/1440p machine, who cares. But if, for example, the Tomb Raider visual mode (not 4k res mode) isn’t viable I’d be a little deflated but just reserve myself to shelling out the funds for the XSX.

Like everything else on the internet, presumption is taken as scientific laws of nature by some and used to grab the torches and pitchforks.

I’m looking at this from a detached point-of-view, though. I’m set on XSX and only XSX for the consoles in our home. The rest is just hobbyist interest in how MS was able to to what they’ve done and some interest in the constraints (time/cost/quality!) they settled with for their target.