The growing third party issue with the Xbox Series S

[Pemalite]

VersusEvil said:

Series S has well and truly hit its limit and is becoming a nasty thorn in MS’ side, time to discontinue it and just focus on the Series X. Only a matter of time (probably soon) devs are gonna straight up stop making Series S compatible games.

The Series S will be around for the entire generation I am afraid. It's the best selling Xbox console currently.

Just expect resolution and framerate cutbacks more often and more severely.

EpicRandy said:

If you view the Xbox series X and S from another point of view there's no real difference when handling game for X and S compare to handling title for the Switch docked vs handled. (Switch GPU literally goes from 768Mhz to 300mhz making the power difference ratio very similar to X vs S). Except that with the switch your are forced to use the same assets while you have the option to be more efficient with the Series S and use lower quality assets like 1080p texture instead of 4k one.

The difference between X and S is far larger than the Switch Docked vs Undocked.

For example, the Switch doesn't loose 60% of it's Ram, it's Ram bandwidth doesn't increase by 150% going from undocked to docked... Which impacts the texture and pixel fillrate of the GPU.

I do agree that the Series S will be targeting a lower visual bar, so it can get away with less hardware, but the Switch comparison isn't even in the same ballpark.

Darc Requiem said:

It has less RAM, less memory bandwidth, and a less powerful GPU than the Xbox One X.

On paper. Black and white specs don't always tell the entire story.

The Series S has more modern, more efficient hardware. It can do more for every Gigabyte of bandwidth and Ram than the One X.

How? AMD improved delta colour compression, added primitive shaders, reduced cache pressures to get more out of tile-based immediate rendering... And that means it can do more with it's limited bandwidth pool.

The fast SSD allows for far more effective asset streaming, so less data needs to be kept in DRAM.

In short, majority of games end up looking better or performing better than the One X. Polaris is just garbage from an efficiency standpoint.