PC Gamer has been near Kotaku/Polygon levels of trash for years now, among the worst gaming sites these days.

PCGamer just letting their nutz hang.

  -5 for some

With the Baldur's Gate 3 launch being delayed now to Sept. 6th on Playstation, I'm afraid that will overshadow the launch of Starfield.  /s

Hello there, fellow Xbox gamers! Been lurking on this great thread for several months now and decided to consult your expert advice - is it worth me trading in my Series S for a Series X if I don't have 4k TV? I got my S for very cheap and it does a great job but I kind of want the most 'premium' experience, just not sure if it's worth it when I'm playing on an older telly. Thanks!

You've came to the wrong place! Jk Welcome to the Thread!

Anyway, if you want the most "premium" experience then I would say yes. Even without a 4K TV, the Series X offers multiple benefits over the Series S. There's more to graphics than just resolution as well, the Series X will have higher graphical settings across the board, things like texture quality, draw distance, lighting, shadows, sharpness, etc.

In addition, you'd be future proofing your experience, a Series X doesn't prevent you from getting a 4K TV or 4K monitor in the future and it doesn't appear as though Microsoft has any intention yet of doing a Series X Pro type of console anytime soon.

What is Supersampling?

A 4K screen is not required to play great games on Xbox One X. Your games will still look and run much better on Xbox One X than any other console on the market regardless of your television and that’s thanks to supersampling. Supersampling also helps to reduce “jaggies” around the edges of objects and other staircasing-like effects

Think of supersampling as the cousin of upscaling. Instead of taking a lower resolution image and blowing up (creating a distortion) like upscaling’s effect, supersampling takes a high-resolution image and scales it down to your television’s native resolution — be it 720p or 1080p — to bring all the information that Xbox One X is pouring into its games and beaming to the screen.

But supersampling is more than just resolution as any Xbox One X Enhanced title running on at 1080p television is still taking advantage of the power of the system. That makes your draw distance better, greater special effects, and everything else that’s running under the hood of the world’s most powerful console.

Yes, a 4K screen will deliver a sharper and clearer image, and HDR will bolster the light and dark features of your game, but supersampling does an effective job of letting you play your games best on Xbox One X regardless of your screen.

(Applies to Series X too).

Many thanks Ryuu, very helpful!

There are definitely benefits to owning a Series X even if you don't have a 4K screen. For starters, games still run at the higher resolution on Series X, they are just sampled down to 1080p when you connect it to a 1080p screen, this sampling down process reduces aliasing artifacts (aka stairstepping artifacts on the edges of in-game assets). Secondly, Series S will be increasingly dropping below native 1080p as we move further into the generation and games become more and more demanding of hardware, which means you will be seeing more and more games that run below the resolution of your screen, just like OG Xbox One often ran below 1080p, some quite visibly below. Thirdly, quite a few games so far this generation are lacking a choice between multiple game modes on Series S, whereas many games on Series X have Quality, Performance, and Balanced modes, alot of those same games have just one mode on Series S, often just quality mode, meaning you are stuck at 30 fps with no choice for a higher framerate on Series S. Lastly, some games have lower graphics settings beyond lower resolution on Series S, meaning that Series X often has things like higher quality textures, shadows, lighting, level of detail distances, etc, on those games, when compared to Series S. And of course, if you decide to get a 4K tv screen before the end of the generation, having a Series X already means that you will be able to make proper use of it.  

Bwuaha.

Sony be like...

"I don’t want a new Call of Duty deal. I just want to block your merger."

*Sees FTC Get Demolished*

"Alright, about that deal, Microsoft..."

And this came when MS was under no obligation whatsoever to do so regarding regulatory challenges. This really put to rest the fake exclusivity concern and argument that MS made all those agreements only to salvage the deals from the regulatory challenges.