casual gamers would be a better term
Wait what?? Are you serious at least say that is your opinion and not a fact because boy you are so lost. You should say “IMO after the first…”
Why would the XSS GPU be anything other than a reduction of CU. You think they ripped ray tracing out of RDNA2?
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Just the same the PS5 Digital Edition won’t play blu ray movies; people will know this going in.
Where have you heard different in regards to the DXR?
I have some friends from my time at MS that are NOT part of Xbox. I’m not claiming to be an insider of any sort, so no confusion. And I hate the DE of both consoles
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I think Sony’s larger market position actually helps MS here. Cross platform devs will primarily target the PS5, which is much closer to X than S. Otherwise X might be too small a market to bother. But the S at $299 is likely to get a big enough share that devs can’t just ignore it either.
Textures and resolution go hand in hand. Resolution is very expensive. I’d also expect better lighting but again, resolution with the lighting is costly as well. It won’t have better frame rates when running at each system’s targeted resolutions. Series X could provide more options for frame rates since technically you could turn down resolution to Series S levels and apply that towards frames. As long as devs have a 4K mode, there is an easy scale to Series S…with potentially less options. Devs will likely always have a 4K mode because 4K is important to sales.
This is like asking because more people have 1080p tv’s then 4k why design for 4k. Because nvdia sells more 1060’s 2060’s why design games for a 2080ti or soon 3080/3090.
Its not an either or decision when you’re designing a game. You can scale the performance you are trying to achieve. The witcher 3 was never made with the Nintendo Switch in mind but you can play the whole game on your switch. Does it look better on my xbox and playstation then on switch? Yes it looks and runs better on xbox and playstation then it does on switch. It also runs better on my PC then it does on Xbox and Playstation. However, none of those experiences are diminished.
You can enjoy the Witcher 3 on all those places. So to ask why would they design games for series X if the series S is sucessful is illogical. The differences between the two aren’t substantial enough to change game design. You are talking about draw distance differences, resolution differences, differences in shadows and ambient occlusion, etc. Its not as if one person has a formula One race car and the other person has a ford escape.
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I talk to a developer who makes game assets. They’re already developing 8K assets with high quality textures and have much more robust lighting available than what you’ll see on Series X. They start much higher and scale all the way down.
The thing that you can’t scale is game design. Things like level layouts. Physics that are core parts of the gameplay. There is nothing that can be done at a checkerboarded 4K resolution on Series X that can’t be done from a game design standpoint on Series S. They both have the same throughput. Same feature sets. Similar compute for gameplay and game design at the targeted specs. Developers are going to have 1080P be the highest resolution on Series X. It’s commercial suicide to do so with or without the S.
Any potential mid gen refresh will be targeting surface level things. Not core game design.
Assume your conjecture that Series S will massively outsell Series X is correct, which it’s most likely not: I guess it’s the same as, if Camrys sell so well, why do Ferrari et al. exist? Why does F1, which pushes the boundary of automobile tech, exist? Gosh I hate car analogies, and your first post on this site made me made one, bravo sir!
Please, “insider” fakery has no place on this site.
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A smaller, cheaper device is expected to out sale a more expensive device. BMW sells more Series 3 than Series 7. Toyota sells more Corolla than any other model. More RTX 2060 sold than RTX2080. Most will compromise on performance or comfort, and buy what is affordable for them. I’m glad a cheaper device will exist which can play they same games, at lower resolution, and make gaming accessible to more people. Those who has the budget and does not want compromises they will have choice too,
I don’t claim to be an insider. I know people at MS because I worked there, and they are once again NOT part of the Xbox division. They are with the Azure team. Personally I hope that the Series S is what you want it to be, and not the crushing disappointment that the 1S has been for me.
I’m sure it will sell fine
Furthermore, I expect the HD add-ons to be $200, which means that a 1.5TB S will cost the same as a 1TB X. Not much of a decision there
It’s not about what you claim, it’s about what you do. If you genuinely have something to share with the community, do so in a sincere way, be very specific (like what you just did), lay out every merit and con your claim is based on, so that people can evaluate the validity of it. If you cannot guarantee that, please refrain from “sharing” it at all.
Fair enough
It’s the same CU’s, just fewer of them. That means the hardware for RT is still there. Development for XSS isn’t an issue. RT, RAM, GPU TF rating, and SSD storage all scale directly with pixel counts. That is how they are accomplishing this. It will literally be an XSX for 1080p TV’s. I bet ya wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference between an XSX and XSS running the same game on a 1080p TV. Everything is the same, except fewer pixels. It is literally just dialing down resolution on the dev side.
XSS isn’t the baseline for development. XSX is. Then they just scale resolution back to 1080p. Done.
Discounting the rest … At $200 less it has a paltry 512GB drive, less RAM, smaller APU, etc - this is known … It’s not much of a value except for casual gamers that only play Fortnite or an EA game once in awhile, that won’t need additional space. Adding an SSD expansion will bring you close to the X price range. Maybe even the exact same cost.
I learned last time not to buy the cheap option - you get what you pay for. It’s the same with all consoles, not just MS. The Switch Lite, for example, is a PoS. The PS4 has held up, but still has problems with the newer PS4 games, and don’t get me started on the 1S - useless for the last two years except as a blu ray player. It makes business sense, but it will absolutely be the lowest denominator across both MS and Sony.
Lowest common denominator will be PC (unless indie that only have limited resources). It doesn’t matter if there’s a refresh or not, things get old and developers will still make the games.
It definitely seems likely that XGS will target native 4K a lot, and I’m not a dev but according to Digital Foundry devs for PS4 used techniques for resolution that made it very hard to notice a real difference with native 4K. Kinda hoping XGS considers this, since that should mean they can do more with the visuals. Xbox Series will have VRS, right? If I’m not mistaken that’s the upscaling tech?
That being said, I don’t think we’re gonna see any game on XSX being the resolution of XSS. A little under native 4K maybe, but not 1440p. Do you?
Anything they do with the Series X will be done with the Series S. If Series X leverages VRS, so will Series S. If Series X uses upscaling, so will Series S. They have the same RDNA2 feature sets. So it’s not like Series X will be outputting upscaled or checkerboarded images leveraging VRS while Series S has to produce those images with less efficiency natively. I don’t see Series X hitting images less than checkerboarded or upscaled 4K. It would be just as jarring to the Series X enthusiast on a high quality 4K TV as 720/900P would be to Series S owners…which is still a possibility if devs decided to forgo resolution for other things. I just don’t think they ever would due to the impact it would have to sales.