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

[Mr Puggsly]

goopy20 said:

Mr Puggsly said:

No, there are many games on X1 hitting 1080p. Many AAA games often settle with 900p. Games locked at 720p is a small list. There are many games with dynamic resolutions that drop to 720p, but PS4 has some of that too.

Agreed, a vast majority of 8th gen gamers are using base specs. So people content with that aren't gonna mind similar resolutions on Series S. And like I said before, a great looking 1080p game like God of War can look more impressive than a 4K game. Therefore the number of pixels isn't necessarily as important as the actual graphics.

I'm confused by your Halo 4/5 comment. Halo 4 is 720p on 360, 1080p on X1. Halo 5 is a dynamic resolution that jumps from about 800p to 1080p.

Again, PS5 could do 4K/60 fps and God of War and still have a lot of power to spare. Gears 5 does 4K/60 fps with room to spare for the highly demanding ultra settings. Developers also have the option of making AAA games at 4K/30 fps, 1440p/60 fps, but they don't have to drop down to 1440p/30 fps unless its a really demanding game visually.

RDR1 was well optimized on 360, likely the lead platform. The PS3 version was 640p and ran worse. RDR2 was not the lead platform on X1, feels like they just settled with 800p considering PS4 is doing 1080p.

Look, we can argue about resolutions all day, but the fact remains that resolution isn't that big a deal for the average console gamer. Most people watch 1080p content all day and can hardly tell the difference between a 1080p or a 4k movie on a 55inch tv. If a game looks great, nobody is going to sit right in front of their tv and say "wait a minute, this is not even 4k!" and feel like they're getting a lackluster experience. 

The real question is how ambitious next gen games will still be if they're designed to run on a 4Tflops Series S and the Xone. Also, if we're talking about parity, what will developers be able to use those extra 8 Tflops for on Series X? My point is that they wouldn't be able to use it for anything except resolution, fps and a bump in graphics settings. Not the things that actually matter like larger/ richer levels, ai, physics, world simulations etc.

Having cheap options might sounds great, but it does come with a major trade off. The worst thing that could happen is if 3rd party developers would start using Series S as the lowest common denominator, limiting their ambitions across all platforms. I'm sure games would still look better than what we're seeing today, but it simply would be a much smaller leap than what it could have been without Series S.  

Agree with your first paragragh. But your previous comments about X1 resolutions was mostly wrong.

The ambition of future MS games isn't inherently limited by Series S or even X1. Is Doom Eternal and Witcher 3 limited by Switch? It also depends on the individual project as games can have features removed.

"larger/ richer levels, ai, physics, world simulations etc." For Series S, all of that can be maintained as that often has little to do with GPU TF. For X1, which will be supported for a period, can scale aspects back like we see on Switch ports for example.

In theory the only significant compromise Series S would make is 4TF vs 12TF. That means the S and X should support the exact same content with GPU heavy aspects being compromised for S. Whether that be performance, graphics settings and/or resolution.

Anyway, you aren't say anything new and for decades we've seen PCs games scale significantly for GPUs.

A powerful graphics card can play RDR2 at 4K/60/Ultra. A lesser card can play it well at 720p/30/Low. Either way you would be playing the exact same game. So if GPU TF is the only disparity, they can likely handle the same large scale and ambitious games.