The growing third party issue with the Xbox Series S

[Darc Requiem]

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.

The CPU and SSD help to compensate for how weak the GPU in the Series S is. The reason games will run at 4K 30fps on One X and 1080 60fps on Series S is the CPU. RDNA2 runs circles around Polaris. That's a why the 36CU GPU in the PS5 smokes a RX 580 which also has 36CUs. The One X GPU is more or less a RX 580. RX 580 has 4 less CUs but is clocked 200mhz higher. RX 5500XT (22CU) and RX 6500XT (16CU), despite being more efficient and on newer architectures yield same performance as the RX 580. The RX 580 has, on paper, a 20% advantage over the 5500XT and 5% Advantage over the 6500XT. Both of those GPUs have higher rasterization performance than the Series S GPU. Honestly a lot of performance was left on the table with the Series S GPU. The 6500XT gets 44% more performance on 25% less CUs on the same architecture as the Series S GPU because it's clocked 1Ghz higher.