Shinobi-san said:
Pemalite said:
SvennoJ said:
Mr Puggsly said:
1. The Series S has less RAM, but its also going to use less RAM than PS5 and Series X by having lower quality assets and resolution, these two things combined can account for a significant amount of RAM. So the impact of less RAM isn't quite certain yet. 2. One X wasn't designed to innovate. The additional RAM helped with resolution and higher quality assets when developers opted to put them in. 3. Series X and PS5 are generally going to target 1440p+ and maybe 60 fps. With that said, Series S could opt for dynamic 1080p, lower graphics settings and even 30 fps if necessary. AC:Valhalla opted for reduced resolution and performance to maintain 9th gen visuals. Meanwhile DMC5 just disabled RT for Series S, while Watch Dogs compromised resolution with RT. There are many options developers have, kinda like when tweaking a PC game's settings. |
Ram also puts a limit on world size and how dynamic/interactive a world can be. That's where the innovation is that will be held back by the the existence of a console with less memory. For example Minecraft, it works on everything, but not the full fat unlimited world experience. Different editions all have different limits on number of active 'actors' and world size. Fine for different systems, yet here game play parity is assumed to be a must.
You can't solve everything with lower resolution and assets and the fact remains, 8GB is zero progress from the current gen. XBox One had 6GB of RAM available to games (started as 5GB, got an extra GB to use later), Series S has 8GB available for games (or 7.5GB, some sources say the OS uses 2.5GB) so there is some more room. However https://gamingbolt.com/xbox-series-s-ram-is-a-major-issue-several-devs-speak-out-about-memory-bottleneck
16GB is already too little of a generational 'leap' imo. This gen should have had 24 GB total if it's going to last for another 7 or 8 years. 16GB is enough for higher assets and higher resolution, leaves very little for more complex dynamic evolving worlds.
My hope is developers can make good use of the SSD to expand working memory, like FS2020 can run on my 16GB laptop thanks to a 20GB pagefile on SSD. When the pagefile was on my hdd I went down to 2fps and total lock ups, oopsie. It still stutters, the game prefers 32GB system ram, but only crashes once every other day now after disabling the HDD pagefile, forcing windows to only use the SSD. |
We need to look towards the PC as an example of how games scale with resolution and memory capacity...
And a good example of that is actually Doom Eternal.
At 1080P Ultra settings (The Series S will likely target Medium in the real world, let's be honest.) Doom Eternal will gobble up 5.230GB of Ram on the Graphics Card.
Bump that resolution up to 2160P/4k and that same game pushes it to 6.025GB of Ram used... That is a 15.2% increase in Ram usage accompanying the 300% increase in resolution.
Thus we can surmise that resolution alone has a negligible impact on memory consumption, it's there... But not a day and night difference.
But if you were to run Doom Eternal at 1080P Medium it will only use 3.500GB of Ram... That is a reduction of 66.9% in memory consumption by lowering detail settings... And that memory consumption discrepancy falls in line with the memory differences between the Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X.
Texture Resolution accounts for a *massive* amount of Ram consumption irrespective of resolution... And that is what will happen with the Series S.
On the resolution side of the equation... Resolution is only one aspect of the graphics presentation of a game... And one that I would argue is actually becoming less important with each successive console generation thanks to new post-process effects and frame reconstruction methods, granted I would prefer the full fat native resolution of my displays being met by the gaming hardware.
So whilst yes... Massive Ram limitations can have ramifications to things like world size, developers will likely cut back on things like texturing first and rely on the SSD as a "scratch pad" to retain world sizes. |
I think a lot of people are under the impression that resolution will be the only cutback on Series S while retaining next gen visuals in other aspects. Personally I was hoping for this too, if I maintained a 1080p TV and wanted to expand on my gaming library. Don't kill my dreams Pemalite! :( |
Even if the Series S was just a 1080P machine, I still wouldn't buy one even for a 1080P display... You are missing out on a big benefit of the Series X, which is super sampling.
Not to mention the series X is just better for backwards compatible games, plus has more storage.
