Rumor: Xbox "Lockhart" specs leaked, is $300

[Mr Puggsly]

goopy20 said:

Mr Puggsly said:

In your scenario, a Series X game doing 1440p/30 fps would be 540p/30 fps on Series S. That would be a very demanding game with high fidelity graphics, that same product would probably be around 1080p on PS5, assuming current rumors are accurate.

It seems like the obvious solution is simply lowering some visual settings to boost resolution on a Series S version. Whether that be lighting, shadows, draw distance, etc. Hence, the same solutions we've used on PC games for decades.

I think you assume AAA games on a 9TF PS5 might have a focus on 1440p-4K/30 fps. I mean it seems highly unlikely Sony will make 1080p games on PS5. So if the next Horizon:ZD and God of War are 1440p/30 fps, its very likely the Series S could handle those same visuals at 900p-1080p.

Again, my comment assumes rumored specs are true.

That's almost accurate except that going from 1440p to 900p isn't going to double the fps. If a game runs at the exact same graphics settings on ps5 at 1440p/30fps they would have to scale it down all the way to 720p to hit 30fps on Series S. And if a game would be 1080p on ps5, they would need to drop it to 540p on Series S.

The Switch might be able to get away with 540p but that's because it's a handheld. On a 55 inch tv it would look like a giant smudge and there's just no way MS would allow developers to release 720p or even 540p games on their "next gen" console. They will likely target 1080p on Series S, cut visual fidelity in half across the board so it can run on 4Tflops, and we'll be playing the same games on Series X at native 4k and checkerboard 4k on ps5. This is why I pray to the gaming gods that this whole Lockhart thing is not real.  

Now of course you could lower some graphics settings on pc. However, console games don't have graphics settings because they are completely optimized for the specific hardware. Therefore, they tend not to use rendering effects that are too expensive with a relatively small gain in visuals. 

Developers can adjust resolution and graphics settings if necessary. Modern engines are generally designed to scale well, your last paragraph ignores that.

For example, some X1 games weren't just a resolution drop vs PS4. They also adjusted graphics settings if necessary. Meanwhile PS4 Pro and X1X sometimes have higher graphics settings along with resolution. You're suggesting console games don't benefit much from tweaking graphics settings, that simply is not reality.l

The odds of Series X and PS5 having 1080p content seems highly unlikely or rare if it ever happns. So we don't need to think about unlikely scenarios, most games next might be 4K or close to even on PS5.

Hence, you're creating unlikely scenarios to make Series S seem like a bad idea.

PS4 had 1.8TF and generally hit 1080p. PS5 probably has 5x the GPU power in practice. Therefore Sony could still hit 4K and still make significantly better looking games. Espeically when you consider X1X hit 4K in something like RDR2.