As for bias, if you can't see that DF is obviously biased for MS, that probably says a a lot about your own biases. During the 360/PS3 era it was all positives for 360 in comparisons. Looking at any fine detail on PS3 games to show how they were inferior. When the PS4 was on top we got excuses for the XBO, questioning if resolution was really that important. An ever slight frame or two advantage on the XBO was more important than a increase in resolution from 720p/900p to 1080p. Usually ending each comparison by saying you'll be happy on either console, when before they were saying which console they recommended to get the game on. The 2nd the XBO X came out, it was here to "save the day."

Now we jump to this gen. DF were helping spread the FUD about PS5's variable clock rate, even having a flawed comparison using RDNA1 chips. When MS showed off their poor looking flagship title, Halo Infinite, quickly they had an excuse vid out, claiming most of the problem was a lack of raytracing. When people pointed out many other things, Alex said he was just too tired to go into it all. Keep in mind, this was just after zooming in really close on PS5 footage to show the raytracing reflections were lower quality or were missing objects. And now after we've had a few next-gen comparisons where they seemed pleasantly surprised about PS5 outperforming XSX, in this video they sound more troubled by it. It's almost as if they either realize that they shouldn't be excited by a system punching above its weight or they were told it's something they shouldn't seem excited by.

Just ask yourself, where are any of the videos making excuses for the way any game performs or looks on PlayStation?

How about his claim, MS?

Xbox Series S means next-gen performance

💪 All-digital gaming experience
💪 1440P at up to 120FPS
💪 4K upscaling for games
💪 DirectX Raytracing
💪 Variable Rate Shading
💪 Variable Refresh Rate#PowerYourDreams pic.twitter.com/hw7K11kADV

— Xbox (@Xbox) September 8, 2020

Did you ever think maybe they were lying and only singing praises to MS because MS paid for the marketing rights on Dirt 5? We've staright up had other developers say that the tools were late and radically redesigned compared to what they were used to on Xbox One *shrugs* Like I said, we will find out within a few months, if these launch games get patches that bring the Series X versions in line with the PS5, and if newly released 3rd parties in the coming months show smaller PS5 advantages and an eventual Xbox lead over time, we will know that it was a late tools/devkits thing. I can wait a few months to find out, I'm not in a rush to see which console is the real performance king this gen, can you wait to find out?

Did you ever think maybe they were lying and only singing praises to MS because MS paid for the marketing rights on Dirt 5? We've staright up had other developers say that the tools were late and radically redesigned compared to what they were used to on Xbox One *shrugs* Like I said, we will find out within a few months, if these launch games get patches that bring the Series X versions in line with the PS5, and if newly released 3rd parties in the coming months show smaller PS5 advantages and an eventual Xbox lead over time, we will know that it was a late tools/devkits thing. I can wait a few months to find out, I'm not in a rush to see which console is the real performance king this gen, can you wait to find out?

Disagree with this personally. The games where the S performance has been "shameful" so far are mainly the same games where Series X is struggling to keep up with PS5, clearly there is an optimization issue going on somewhere for the entire Xbox Series platform. Yakuza 7 is 1440p 30 fps on S compared to 4K 30 fps on X, exactly the performance difference between the two consoles that MS promoted, and the Dragon Engine in Yakuza is one of the most demanding engines. Series S is pulling off I believe 900p-1080p with ray tracing on Watch Dogs, not bad at all considering how demanding ray tracing is. Gears Tactics is 1440p 60 fps on Series S, and Series S is 1440p dynamic 60 fps on the updated Gears 5 with higher PC graphics settings than the last gen version. CoD is 1440p 60 fps on Series S. The main games where S has struggled are AC Valhalla and Dirt 5, the same two games where Series X is also struggling. 

Yes, Digital PS5 is significantly more powerful than S for $100 more, but you can tell that Sony is taking a huge loss at that price, there is a reason why there seems to be anywhere from 4x-8x as many PS5 disc drive units available this Holiday depending on the country and retailer, Sony is clearly trying to minimize their losses from the $400 price point on the digital model until they can get manufacturing costs down. MS is likely selling at a loss on Series S as well, though it is likely a smaller loss than Sony is selling Digital PS5 at, which is why Series S | X stock ratio so far as shown far more Series S units available than digital PS5 units, around 2-3 X units to every 1 S unit in most countries, compared to as many as 8 disc drive PS5's for every 1 digital PS5. 

And that is also part of why I find this whole thing strange. The new Xbox Game Core dev tools were designed to make Xbox development easier, the entirety of Series S | X and the Game Core dev tools were designed to make Xbox development more PC like, so that developers could easily port their PC version (which is the version that most developers make first) onto S and X, choose the PC resolution and graphical settings which make the most sense for each console, and then optimize to hit those settings with a good framerate at the desired resolution. With Series S and X being more PC like than ever before, optimizing for them should not be difficult, and yet both Series S and X are preforming below expectations on launch games. 

That tells me the answer for the poor performance is one of 3 things personally:

1. The late tools/dev kit rumors are true, and devs just didn't have time to used to Xbox Series ahead of launch. This theory makes the most sense to me and has been backed up by some indie devs I believe I read. These consoles were coming in hot during a pandemic afterall, and we've had rumors all year that MS was behind schedule during development. I mean just look at how many of their 1st and 3rd party launch window exclusives have been delayed out of the launch window, Halo, CrossFireX, 12 Minutes, The Medium, The Ascent, The Artful Escape, that reeks to me of dev kits and tools coming out late.

2. PS5, despite having on paper lower specs except for the SSD speed and pixel fill rate, is easier to develop for in spite of Microsoft's effort to make porting from PC to Series S | X easier. Possible I'd say, but not as likely as the delayed tools/devkits.

3. 3rd party devs are just being lazy and don't want to optimize for both S and X, and are just porting over some lower PC settings instead of optimizing to hit higher settings on each console. If it was just Ubisoft's launch games having issues, I'd say this was the culprit, as they are well known to be lazy optimizers, but Dirt 5, which MS had marketing on, is also behind, and PS5 also has an advantage in one of DMC 5's performance modes. I don't think this is the issue personally. 

Otherwise in pure compute scenarios the Xbox Series X not only has the brute-strength advantage but also some efficiency advantages such as Variable Rate Shading which gives it the edge for things like global illumination lighting and shading.

And this is why we wait before making assumptions or calling Digital Foundry bias, people.

Anonymous people do tend to be more honest, I don't think it's unbelievable to suggest that a developer which has a marketing partnership with Xbox isn't exactly going to say negative things about their tools.

The stuff I posted here: https://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=9247175 are from official documents straight from Microsoft which shows the SDK is coming in hot.

With the next generation of the Xbox console, Microsoft is working on a new development environment called Game Core. The environment is now available to developers building titles for the series X and series S (Lockhart) but it’s not quite finished yet and won’t be finished before the release of the upcoming consoles.

The purpose of Game Core is two-fold, to make it easier to develop games for the two SKUs of series X/S and it is designed to make game development closer to that of building a traditional Windows 10 application.

This doesn’t mean that there will not be more updates arriving to the GDK before release, but it does mean that the June 2020 GDK will be the baseline for developing next-generation titles.

Considering Game Core is all new, not everything will be ready for the launch of the consoles. While developers can now use the June 2020 release for games that will head to retail, features like “Multi-process games in Game Core” will not arrive until after launch. There is a work-around for this in the current release, so fret not that this means games can’t be multi-threaded.

The takeaway here is that Microsoft’s Game Core is moving full-steam ahead and will be ready for launch later this year. But it’s not complete and there are quite a few bugs/optimization that need to be worked out before all the functionality meets the targeted spec sheet when the project was first started.

This look so much as a saving face comment.

It doesn't occur on photo modo because it is static, it doesn't occur in 60fps mode because it is a different mode. Sure they wil patch and improve (and we will need to see if it doesn't impact anywhere else), still doesn't really look like a bug. Bugs usually don't affect 100% users in a whole mode 100% the time. That is a choice (can be a poor one) or a grave mistake (that doesn't make sense no one in their QC, MS and etc wouldn't see even more because it seems it was exactly like that couple months ago on the preview).