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Forums - Gaming Discussion - The growing third party issue with the Xbox Series S

EpicRandy said:
Darc Requiem said:

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.

That was fine theory before the gen started but we've already seen that it's not the case. Games are ready sub 1080p on the Series S and we haven't fully gotten away from cross gen yet. 



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Darc Requiem said:
EpicRandy said:

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.

That was fine theory before the gen started but we've already seen that it's not the case. Games are ready sub 1080p on the Series S and we haven't fully gotten away from cross gen yet. 

Quite rhe contrary most game just prove this theory. Sub 1080 games are also sub 4k on ps5 and series 5.



EpicRandy said:

Quite rhe contrary most game just prove this theory. Sub 1080 games are also sub 4k on ps5 and series 5.

Yes, and 1440p is perfectly fine from a regular sitting distance. 30 fps is also perfectly fine for many genres.

So you could make a fully dynamic open world with deformable terrain like From Dust (but not restricted to a tiny world), using all available RAM and resources running 1440p30 on PS5 and Series X. But how would that run on Series S. RAM and memory bandwidth are not only for 4K textures and higher fps. Sure, if used only for rendering at higher resolutions, then it's no problem. To make more interactive games you need more fast memory. Split-screen requires more RAM and high memory bandwidth to basically run two instances of the game.

RAM restricts what you can do when it comes to dynamic worlds and building games. RAM also restricts what you can do in terms of optimizations. Memory is the biggest resource for development. 4K textures is just a small part of it.

Anyway 16GB is already cramped, I wouldn't want anything less than 32GB on my gaming laptop. It's cpu and gpu are far weaker than Series X, yet thanks to 32GB RAM (+another 6GB video ram) I can crank up FS2020 to draw distances the Series X can never compete with, while draw distance on Series S in FS2020 is pretty awful. For a flight sim draw distance is immersion. It's incredible they got it working yet would have been better with more RAM.

Series S has benefited from the much longer cross generation period than usual, yet now it's turning into a boat anchor for new game innovation, or will get left behind with new game innovations.



Radek said:

I disagree with Hogwarts Legacy being badly optimized on consoles. It's 1440p 60 fps on PS5 and it holds 60 fps majority of the time.

Meanwhile XSS version is only 792p in 60 fps, which is definitely a last gen resolution, it even has loading screen when leaving Hogwarts interior due to low amount of RAM (10GB vs 16GB)

GTA VI however will be a true test of things to come.

You don't think the game being cross-gen took away from better optimization? It's not unplayable, but it has really bad screen tearing in certain areas and dips in FPS on Series X. Raytracing isn't even worth using on console. Instead of a performance patch which should have released by now, the devs are working their butts off to get the last gen and Switch versions out. 



Kyuu said:
EpicRandy said:

It still result in 2 different specs with which dev have to deal with and they deal with it with very similar aproach. But yeah the difference X/S vs switch dock vs handeld is greater but so is 1080p/4k vs 720p/1080p. 

Also it does not loose 60% of the ram 10/16 is 62 % which is 38% lower not 60%

RAM (available for developers) is 8GB vs 13.5GB. So Series X is about 69%~ higher.

So Series S have 59% so still plenty of headroom when dealing with a game with 25% resolution target. Of course game logics and sounds should take the same amount of ram on Series S than on Series x but those aren't nearly as intensive on Ram space and even less so on bandwith. 



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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.



smroadkill15 said:
Radek said:

I disagree with Hogwarts Legacy being badly optimized on consoles. It's 1440p 60 fps on PS5 and it holds 60 fps majority of the time.

Meanwhile XSS version is only 792p in 60 fps, which is definitely a last gen resolution, it even has loading screen when leaving Hogwarts interior due to low amount of RAM (10GB vs 16GB)

GTA VI however will be a true test of things to come.

You don't think the game being cross-gen took away from better optimization? It's not unplayable, but it has really bad screen tearing in certain areas and dips in FPS on Series X. Raytracing isn't even worth using on console. Instead of a performance patch which should have released by now, the devs are working their butts off to get the last gen and Switch versions out. 

I mean by that logic, almost all games released thus far take away from optimization, because there has been only few games that are current gen only.

What's the next current gen only game? Kill the Justice League?

In September we will see how Starfield devs treated Series S, this is a big first party game now.



Radek said:
smroadkill15 said:

You don't think the game being cross-gen took away from better optimization? It's not unplayable, but it has really bad screen tearing in certain areas and dips in FPS on Series X. Raytracing isn't even worth using on console. Instead of a performance patch which should have released by now, the devs are working their butts off to get the last gen and Switch versions out. 

I mean by that logic, almost all games released thus far take away from optimization, because there has been only few games that are current gen only.

What's the next current gen only game? Kill the Justice League?

In September we will see how Starfield devs treated Series S, this is a big first party game now.

That's my point. We haven't seen much because almost everything released so far is cross-gen, even first party. I can't put much faith in complete optimization for Series S or any of the current gen consoles for that matter. Do I think the Series S could run Hogwarts Legacy higher res than 792P@60? Yes. There have also been games that run well on the Series S like A Plagues Tale Requiem. 

Starfield and Forza will be the next test. 



Kyuu said:

Series S is 25%-35% the real world "power" of the much more popular counterpart and the inevitable industry standard, the PS5. Digital Foundry is already calling for Microsoft to stop mandating it, which is what I predicted before the generation started and got accused of "console warring" for it. Some of the same people who defended and glorified this thing will thank Microsoft for ditching it as a requirement down the road. Mandating it would only lead to more "moneyhatted" PS5 exclusives. The "power doesn't matter" crowd are in for a rude awakening. Microsoft isn't Nintendo and Xbox isn't a hybrid.

On the flip side, Switch 2's existence may future proof Series S to some extent, since its GPU power is rumoured to be around that level. In other words, some developers won't think "Series S is holding us back for a small return" but rather think "Series S and Switch 2 have too large of a combined active install base to ignore." In that sense, Series S and Switch 2 might assist each other.

Regardless, if Series S remains mandated all gen, expect more games to skip Xbox altogether in a similar fashion to PS4 games skipping Switch 1. Also expect a lot of horribly optimized games that just exist to meet Microsoft's on paper requirements. A Cyberpunk 2077 galore.

The Series S likely sits just below the Radeon RX 6500XT in terms of capability.
It has more single precision FP, Texture fillrate and bandwidth than the 6400, but less pixel fillrate.

It's basically lowest-tier discreet GPU capability. Still better than the One X.

I do think the Series S needs to stick around for the entire generation, developers just need to make deeper cuts to their game to shoehorn them on the console, it is possible, just takes some extra development time.
I would also like to see the Series S get a revision to increase the internal SSD size and potentially add a Bluray drive or release an external Bluray drive.

The Series S is Microsoft's best selling console this generation, it's also the cheapest next-gen console, so they do need to keep that around and capitalise on it, especially as many people start to tighten belts due to economic uncertainty.


Norion said:

We're already seeing games not have an option for 4k 60fps and the cross-gen period isn't even over yet so a game as huge and demanding as GTA 6 is gonna be will only run at 60fps on the PS5 and Series X at a resolution much lower than 4k. Because of that I highly doubt it'll run on the Series S at 1080p 60fps. Due to how anaemic it's gonna be a few years from now late gen there are gonna be cases of games that ran as badly on the Series S as games like Control and Cyberpunk did on the last gen consoles or at least close to that if Microsoft never stops mandating support for it.

As a Series S, X, PS5, PC and Switch owner... I would have absolutely zero objection if GTA5 targets say... 900P and 30fps on the Series S.

My expectation for the Series S is that it will be a console where games are compromised compared to it's bigger brothers. - Just dropping down to 30fps doubles your render time window.
For simpler titles like Ori or Rayman, I do expect true 4k or better on the Series S.

I would also like to see Backwards compat games run in their "One X" mode on Series S. (Except Xbox One titles of course due to the Ram difference.)


Darc Requiem said:

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.

The CPU was the biggest hindrance.
But lets not pretend the bandwidth hungry Graphics Core Next GPU wasn't an issue either... It was a compute centric GPU architecture.

The Series X is more than twice the GPU power of the One X.

Graphics Core Next 4.0 vs RDNA2 remember. Night and day difference.

Darc Requiem said:

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.

The Series S has a uniformed pool of Ram, it's using a clamshell memory design. The difference is, that a part of the mapped ram is running slower. That's it. - That memory is mapped to the OS, developers don't even need to worry about it, it won't even be used for games, the speed isn't important as it's not being used for bandwidth intensive scenarios anyway, it could have been 16GB/s and it wouldn't have mattered.

The Series S at 10GB and the One X at 12GB may seem significant... But we need to remember that the Series S only dedicates 2GB of that memory to the OS, where the One X had 3GB of it's memory to the OS.

So it's a difference of 8GB vs 9GB of usable Ram for actual games...

I don't know about you, but 8GB vs 9GB is fairly insignificant.

Dropping from 13GB to 8GB of ram is significant, which is why I would have loved to have seen the Series S release with identical Ram capacity and CPU clocks to the Series X so this would never be an issue.
But it is the hand of cards we were dealt with.

But also keep in mind that when you reduce textures, meshes, objects and more, the Ram requirement also reduces.

Game engines are extremely scalable, games have been scaling on PC GPU's that range from 4GB to 16GB for years now, mostly due to texturing demands.

Darc Requiem said:

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. 

I think we need to put in perspective the reason why the Series S exists.

It's for people who want to play AAA games on a budget with no care about performance or graphics... Or for people who are more interested in mass-online games like Fortnite.

It's expected that more compromises will occur for Series S releases.

EpicRandy said:

Also it does not loose 60% of the ram 10/16 is 62 % which is 38% lower not 60%

Check your math on that. I am talking physical Ram not usable Ram.


EpicRandy said:

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.

The Xbox 360 had games that used 4k textures. I.E. 4096x4096 textures. Some games even higher resolution textures than that.
Xbox 360 has 0.5GB of Ram verses the Series S at 10GB. (8GB for games).

I think people get confused with texture resolution and output resolution of a rendered scene. They are actually independent.

And no, a 4k texture will not always require 4x the bandwidth of a 1080P one, delta colour compression will compress certain maps better than others based upon the frequency of predictable patterning in the map itself and can save a considerable amount of bandwidth.

Darc Requiem said:

That's not addressing two of the biggest issues with Xbox Series platform. The split memory pool and the fact that the API doesn't allow you to get as "close to metal" as the PS5. MS should but bit the bullet and put an extra 4GB of RAM on the Series X so that all of the RAM would have 560GB/s of bandwidth. By splitting the pool they've nullified their own bandwidth advantage because devs have to account some of the memory being restricted to 336GB/s. And that's leaving the elephant in the room, the Series S, out of the equation. 

Considering that the biggest hindrance to older high-level API's was the number of draw calls... Direct X 12 was adopted with low-level API optimizations to reduce those impacts.

Mantle literally shook up the industry on that front... To the point there is really no point building games to the metal anymore, unless you are an engine developer.
And yes. Xbox has it's own low-level API. - Remember Mantle was essentially a copy of the Xbox API.




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I fail seeing the point of this thread, seeing as we are getting last gen versions of games untill atleast 2024.



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