Xbox Series S refresh

[DonFerrari]

SvennoJ said:

VAMatt said:

I'd say that any rumors about an upgraded system slated for release 3 years from now are just plain bullshit. There's a good chance that it will come true, but there certainly isn't any firm plan for something like that at this point.

I think what is most likely to happen is a series S price drop, and the introduction of a series X spec machine without a disk drive. Eventually the series X will drop in price to be the low cost machine, and there will be an upgraded version with higher specs than the current series X.

MS talked in the middle of last generation about an end of generations. They had to move off of that because they needed a clean break from their relatively lackluster Xbox One sales. But, I do think it's very likely that this is the last clear new generation of consoles from Microsoft. From here it will just be price drops of the existing machines and introduction of higher spec models at the top of the price spectrum.

I do think it's likely that the current series X is the last machine that they will release with a disk drive. Maybe there will be one more, but we are definitely near the end of that, for better or worse. 

That would be a shame (no more disc drive). There are still many parts of the world with limited internet and even though my internet is fine, the lower storage this gen has only made physical releases more important to me. Plus I use the consoles as (4k) blu-ray players as well. If the Series S had a disc drive I would have snapped one up for my home theater (1080p projector).

It's just easier to delete a game knowing you can simply install it from disc again without having to rely on available bandwidth. At least for those that don't have insane patches.... My PS5 is full already and I guess yesterday evening the check for updates cycle came along. 5 minutes of messages, can't update ... free up space. Where do I turn that off. (Some could update, some could not, stupid copy entire game nonsense, and why does almost everything have a patch)

Anyway, I imagine at some point game developers will want to move away from baked lighting/shadows/reflections and use HW ray tracing or some other new techniques only, to ease development and file sizes. We're not at the end yet of only getting more incremental updates, at least one more generational hardware change will happen leaving software based (or rather preprocessed storage based) solutions behind. It will take a while just like the transition from software rendering to GPU. For now console HW ray tracing is in the early 3D card stage, Voodoo 3DFX (1996). Not quite at the GeForce 256 level yet (1999). UT2004 was I think the last game that still offered software rendering (not requiring a GPU)

In theory I have a good internet, but in reality when I first started my PS5 and it asked for a 1Gb update it took almost 1h to download. Even though 2 days later it downloaded a 50Gb game in like the same 1h.