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EpicRandy on 11 March 2023
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Darc Requiem said:
EpicRandy said:

Last gen boat anchor were dur to the cpu being underwhelming from the get go. The series S has the same cpu as the series X. Ram and bandwith are non issue since the assets are also les memory intensive unless game dev decide to use 4k assets and downscale them runtime but that would be the case of bad optimization on the dev part.

The CPUs were weak last gen. It's the reason for the lack of 60fps games. That said, the last couple years, multiplatform games on base Xbox One were struggling. It was almost meme. "I wonder how this will run on the old Xbox One VCR." The gap in graphical power between base Xbox One/S was generational. The One X had over 4.5 times the GPU power of the base model. By comparison the Series X had double the GPU power of the One X.

When it comes to the Series S, memory more than GPU power is the biggest problem. Not only is the memory pool of the One X larger 12GB to 10GB. The One X has a unified pool of RAM. All the RAM in the One X has 326GB/s bandwidth. The Series S has a split memory pool. Something frowned upon by developers to begin with. In the Series S, 8GB of RAM runs 224GB/S and other 2GB of RAM has only 56GB/s of bandwidth. That's slower than the DDR3 in the base Xbox One (68GB/s) that developers were complaining about that last gen. The slow memory pool of the Series X (6GB at 336GB/s) is 50% faster than the "fast" memory pool of the Series S. The biggest complaint I see from developers is having to go from the 13.5 to 14GB of memory available in the PS5 an Series X to the 8GB of much slower RAM in the Series S. The Series S has half the memory bandwidth of the PS5.

As for developer optimization, it's always an issue. Most publishers are content with the bare minimum. It's why having multiple performance targets for a single platform is a problem. It leads to two scenarios. Games being built around the weaker platform and the stronger platform not being leveraged to it's capability. Or the weaker platform getting substandard versions of the games on the stronger one. The former was the case with the Xbox One. The latter is becoming the case with the Xbox Series. Developers that are allowed to go the extra mile are the exception not the rule. Giving them two significantly different performance targets for your platform compounds matters. It's bad enough most games require a day one patch to "optimize" game performance. 

Memory bandwith need to be huge because at this point all assets are uncompressed. On memory bandwith a 4k texture will literally and exactly required 4x the bandwith of a 1080p one and texture are literaly what is bandwith hungry when rendering a game. So normaly the series S could get away with about 25% bandwith compare to the X but it have 40% meaning it has headroom when targeting 1/4 of the res. The lower bandwith ram part should be mostly used by the os reserved memory so no impact on game. You also find all other specs to have similar headroom to what they would required in this scenario. Dev can get away with minimum effort here by targeting 1/4 the res and having assets accordingly but great port to the S will try to tap into this headroom to target slightly higher res like 1200p when 4k on the series X.

So again the series S will be just fine for the entire gen.