Yeah, you’re exactly right. We already know X1X enhanced games are supported on XSX but not on Lockhart because of the GitHub leak. There were two back compat modes listed for Arden (XSX SOC), one matching the One X GPU config and one matching the One S GPU config. For Sparkman (Lockhart SOC) only the One S back compat mode was listed.
Kind of sucks honestly, but I guess MS is confident the mainstream console gamer will never notice and they’re probably right about that. But like, it’s gonna bother me that a One X can play Horizon 4 at 60FPS but Lockhart won’t be able to
The Series S is better in basically every way than the One X and has a signicantly better CPU. The only thing it will not able to do is play games at 4k but rather 1080/1440. The framerates will match whatever the Series X does.
We are talking about previous generation games that run in native 4k in a machine from 2017. If they can’t run in native 4k in a machine from 2020, then there’s something wrong.
Just using this as a jumping off point for the benefit of others to say that there are some REALLY affordable and high-quality budget 4k sets out there now. I’m a big TCL fan. I got a 55inch TCL 4K/HDR set 2 years ago, for just $300.
It would have the power to run the game at that resolution and framerate, the question is whether the limited RAM (10GB on the XSS vs 12GB on the X1X) would prevent ANY X1X enhanced games from running.
The X1X gives 9GB to devs and 3 to the OS (source: Powering Xbox One X: Custom AMD APU - The Xbox One X Review: Putting A Spotlight On Gaming). The XSX’s 16GB is split 13.5GB for games and 2.5GB for OS (Inside Xbox Series X: the full specs | Eurogamer.net). I expect the OS to use sightly less memory because of the 1080p target (the first article touches on this). But could it go down to only 1GB? I don’t know. Possibly if some of that is used as part of the encoded capture data used as part of the game PVR function. Encoded 1080p uses less data than encoded 4K, after all.
So that number is something to keep an eye on. 12GB would make more sense for full BC.
The other issue is the lack of a disc drive. For those with many Xbox One games on disc that they want to play on the XSS…how does BC benefit them at all? A disc-less machine is great as a Gamepass box, but not so much as an upgrade to the next gen for current Xbox gamers with physical libraries.
It certainly makes migrating harder. I wish they would offer a cheaper discless model for those who want it, and another with a disc for people who want to able to play their current games.
Judging by the Xbox game cases, that won’t be the case. There’s no mention of Series S anywhere in the box.
No, they won’t in all cases, because despite its hardware advantages the Series S doesn’t have a One X back compat profile. So for Xbox One games that are X enhanced (like Horizon 4 60 FPS mode), those enhancements won’t be available on Series S unless they do new work to update the game.
It really is the replacement for the One S. If you want to be guaranteed access to the best performance and all modes in every game, you need a Series X.
Sorry if I’m misunderstanding here… but Horizon 4 isn’t a backwards compatibile title, it’s One X enhanced. Why would the backwards compatibility profile matter here?
Has it been confirmed that Series S won’t run Xbox One games Series X enhancements?
That was basically my understanding with games like FH4, Gears 5, Sea of Thieves and Ori 2, that they just won’t be BC games but have their own version for next-gen consoles. If that is the case, I don’t see why the Series S couldn’t have a 1080p/1440p version at 60FPS.
Edit: I seem to recall an artcile about Sea of Thieves having BC upgrades for Series X, so it would be a BC game, but with Gears 5, I’m not sure if it is a whole new version or just a BC enhancement.
So, in the GitHub leak that showed data about both the PS5 and the Xbox GPUs, we saw that the Series X GPU had the following modes (doing this from memory, might get the names wrong or something).
Native
Gen0
Gen1
We know what each mode is because they listed the ROP count. So native showed 64 ROPs (now confirmed), Gen0 showed 16 (matches Xbox One S), and Gen1 showed 32 (matches Xbox One X).
On the Lockhart GPU, only Native (don’t remember the count) and Gen0 with 16 ROPs was shown.
When playing a previous gen (Xbox One, 360, or OG) game on Series X or Series S, it is running in a backward compatibility mode. The mode presents a virtualized hardware configuration to the game that appears to be the Xbox One S or Xbox One X hardware it’s been compiled to run on. As the Xbox team has pointed out, they can make improvements over a game’s performance on the original hardware because they’re not actually limited to a physical Xbox One GPU - but they have to show the game what it expects to see for it to work properly without being rewritten.
The implication of the GitHub leak is that, on Series S, they can only show games running in backward compatibility mode the One S GPU configuration, so games with X enhancements won’t have those options available.
This is possible, but it does represent new work. I could definitely see MS going back and giving key first party games like Horizon 4, Gears 5 etc. better performance on the Series S that might match or exceed the One X. But that would basically be repackaging them as Series S/Series X games, so they wouldn’t be limited to running in backward compatibility mode.
A better example for this discussion is probably something like Rise of the Tomb Raider, which also has a 60FPS performance mode on Xbox One X. I doubt Square Enix will go back to update that title for Series S/Series X. So it will be limited to 30FPS on Series S.
Sure, and I’m looking forward to it quite a lot. To be clear, I think Lockhart will do extremely well, and I don’t think 99% of its owners will ever know they might have missed out on a 60FPS mode in Rise of the Tomb Raider or whatever. Anyone who knows that Rise of the Tomb Raider has a 60FPS mode and cares about it is in the target audience for Series X.
