According to some pre-launch reports, Xbox Series S game sizes are supposed to be smaller than on Series X.
“With a performance target of 1440p at 60 fps, our expectation is that developers will not ship their highest level mipmaps to Xbox Series S, which will reduce the size of the games,” Ronald said. “Ultimately the controls in the developer’s hands. We’ve had this technology for a while that allows developers to intelligently choose which assets to install on which device they’re playing on. So the flexibility is in the developers’ hands to make sure the right assets are there.”
Basically it depends on the developers to make use of the technology Xbox has.
Now that the consoles have launched, I’m curious to know if there are games making use of that technology, and how smaller can Series S games be.
So, if you do have a Series S, would you kindly tell us how large are the games you have installed?
For comparison, here are a few Series X games sizes:
Does everyone know about the “Shrinkable games” feature? I just found this today. Go to My Games and Apps -> Manage -> Free up space -> Shrinkable games. Here’s what I see:
Sea of Thieves: Shrinks by 29.6 GB
State of Decay 2 Juggernaut Edition: Shrinks by 739.5 MB
Crackdown 3 Campaign: Shrinks by 4.7 GB
Halo 5 Guardians: Shrinks by 1.6 GB
Ori and the Will of the Wisps: Shrinks by 886.2 MB
The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim Special Edition: Shrinks by 7.2 GB
Some of those are pretty small but just those 6 games for me is nearly another 45 GB of space, that’s like 12% of the total space on the Series S SSD!
As far as absolute sizes for games on my Series S, I don’t have many in common with the OP but I’ll list some others too:
I think it will be a matter of devs lopping off mip level in the code, so a lot of cross gen or BC-like titles won’t have that done yet. Proper next gen games probably all should though. I know SoT is something like 17GB on XSS vs 47GB on XSX, btw.
My understanding is that 60% of the game binary is texture data, and this will shrink for XSS compared to XSX. If LOD bias is shifted by 1 (ie games are 1080p), then we might get at best a 1/3 of XSX texture. So, making simple math, say game size is 100GB on XSX, then 40GB will be no texture, the 60GB texture might be 20GB, so at best we might see 100GB on XSX and 60 GB on XSS. It will be interesting to see what these pan out of the generation. I think we will see improved and optimization of texture use with smart delivery, specially with first party games.
Yeah. Jason Ronald said to expect around 30% reduction. You can also lop off some of the lower LOD mips too I suppose due to being so small ya won’t resolve details at 1080p anyhow.
Perhaps it makes sense if you can edit your original post and put the table right there so people don’t have to scroll down to see the list, this could be very interesting in the future.
On a side note, I think I found something interesting. When we check the file info for installed optimized games like Dirt 5 and Gears 5, it shows the following info for me:
Applied:Xbox-Anaconda
Borderlans 3, No Man’s Sky and We Happy Few, on the other hand, does not have that information. I THINK that games that are optimized for the Series X|S in general does not show any info; while games that have specific optimized versions for both the Series S and Series X show the “Applied” information.
@PianoBlack@ericsongmoi can you check the file info for any optimized game you have installed and see if there is any “Apllied” info available? My guess is that in your case it would show “Applied:Xbox-Lockhart”.
Another interesting note: optimized games appear with a “ConsoleType:XboxGen9” note. Sea of Thieves, on the other hand, shows a “ConsoleType:XboxOneGen9Aware” note and “Applied:Xbox-Scorpio”, as if it wasn’t a genuine next-gen port.
Good catch! I checked all optimized games I have installed right now and the only one I see this info is Ori and the Will of the Wisps(codename Patagonia? Cool). Most games just show XboxGen9, but Ori has:
Applied: Xbox-Lochart;Xbox-Anaconda
I’ve seen the screenshot you had posted before, and if I remember correctly it showed ConsoleType:XboxOneGen9Aware, didn’t it? I think it also showed AppModel:XDK and Gen:Durango?
That’s odd. Ori in my console shows AppModel:GDK, Gen:Scarlett and ConsoleType:XboxGen9.
