Series S vs Series X (resolution, performance, etc.)

[DonFerrari]

Mr Puggsly said:

SvennoJ said:

Mr Puggsly said:

Again, the enviornment changing form and allowing water to realistically flow around it is more CPU and GPU intensive. But thank you for elaborating.

According to MS the Crackdown destruction was CPU intensive. Probably too demanding even for current gen CPUs.

So Outerworlds struggled with 8th gen RAM limitations, but it also works on Switch? Impressive. I guess what I was really trying to say is 8th gen has plenty of open world games with lots of activity and the Series S specs overall can expand on that significantly. Especially if the SSD can alleviate stress on RAM and quickly load in signifcant data given its apparently 40x faster.

That article about Crytek from 2014 shows you are grasping at straws. For two reasons, that studio has sucked this generation and games have become significantly more impressive on 8th gen hardware since 2014. Seriously, don't bother with crap like that.

Developers primary focus will be to keep making tradional games with improved visuals and maybe increase the scale. What you are asking for is more like tech demos that developers probably aren't aiming for.

But since Sony 1st party is not hindered by Series S, maybe they will develop this amazing project you have in your head.

What has gotten significantly more impressive in terms of dynamism and interactivity?
From dust was a tech demo?

Memory was a big constraint and will be again. For example, Fallout 4, constantly hitting the limit while building
https://gamecrate.com/why-hardware-limitations-made-developing-way-out-xbox-one-special-challenge/18596
Series S doesn't only have less RAM, it's slower as well

We'll see how it goes. Today I had to abort my storm chasing in FS2020, the game needed too much RAM slowing down to sub 5fps with windows trying to provide more through pagefile and compressing parts of the memory. It didn't crash at least :)

I'll keep dreaming about worlds that actually change over time without limits to building.

From Dust was small in scale. Applying the tech you're suggesting to racing games would be cool, but again its more of CPU and GPU problem.

On a side note, Hydro Phobia was a really cool game given the specs it was on. Which shows games can be innovative even on very limited specs.

When I suggested 8th gen didn't struggle with RAM as much, I mean games didn't start to break because lack of RAM. Kinda like Skyrim on PS3. Games just worker more seemless even after many hours of play.

I am not sure how much slower RAM matters, especially since its still pretty fast. The general consensus is the amount of RAM available could be a bigger problem.

"I'll keep dreaming about worlds that actually change over time without limits to building." Next gen consoles still have limits.

Either way, the point of this thread is we observe what ports are looking like in practice. That's more interesting than debating what may happen.

Seems like I picked the wrong post from you to quote. But I do agree that with Series S in the market for 299, buying baseline X1S is obsolete (and for me with Series X on 499 X1X also became obsolete, reason why MS stopped manufacturing). Devs may cheap out and not make the best choices on Series S? Sure they can, but it still is a upgrade over baseline X1.

AkimboCurly said:

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

I don't remember 50% gap in resolution/performance on PS4 and X1 being common (very few games were 720p vs 1080p, most would be 900 vs 1080 or 720 vs 900), and don't think that was due to the edram.