| Mr Puggsly said: The primary differences thus far between Series S and X games has been performance, resolution and ray tracing. The games simply playing is more important. I am an avid gamer and I want the premium option. But the Series S is already a success. If you were fine with base consoles before, Series S is still a huge overall upgrade. |
For people with a 1080p screen the difference between Series S and X will be framerate, texture details and supersampling. I think Series S will get Watch-Dogs style ray-tracing as a rule of thumb. At any rate I don't think going off Yakuza as a baseline is very wise. Nonetheless I don't want to see any more AC Valhalla situations where Series S targets 1440p/30 instead of 1080p/60fps.
On the technical level the only concern I have about the S is that the memory is not unified. The biggest reason the Xbox One lagged so far behind the base PS4 last gen was that rendering targets needed to be squished into that tiny 32MB of ESram, meanwhile only 5 (patched to 6) GB of the shared system memory was available to used for games. Big multiplatforms had non-trivial amounts of memory sitting idle because frankly they couldn't access it without a lot of effort that quite often wasn't worth exerting on the One S. Meanwhile PS4 had unified RAM and it was faster. This complexity brought the PS4's theoretical 25%~ lead in graphics performance up to a 50% increase in resolution and often higher framerates to boot.
My point is just that the more complicated Xbox make their memory architecture, the worse they hold up against Playstation equivalents, because multiplatforms tend to be developed there first. The Series X is sexy and unified, except for some of the RAM running slower. The Series S isn't, and I see a repeat. The Series S CPU is not a problem. It actually appears to be faster than the PS5's. The GPU may begin to struggle at 1440p/30 or 1080p/60 but graphics can be scaled without damaging core gameplay. But yeah. Dev tools are important and Series S needs some love from devs
