I can see the point that having to also port games to last gen will take away time that could have been spent optimizing for series s, but I also do wonder if that extra time gained will be negated by games becoming too complex to easily run on xsx or PS5 anyway. I can't be alone in thinking that these days of games regularly having almost native 4k won't last forever. Someone at some point is going to start pushing graphical fidelity at the cost of resolution/fps.

Meshes deformation are all handled by the CPU, all games logics are, a feature rich title will make extensive use of the CPU and will likely be CPU bottlenecked. that's why it was important For the series S to have the same capacity CPU wise. Mesh are simply not that demanding on memory and memory bandwidth. for instance a single uncompressed full 4k texture channel is literally 48MB in memory, for the same size you can have meshes with 16M+ vertices and up to the same amount of tris (max is same amount -1). On Series S your likely to also work with mesh with less LoD so should even be easier on the CPU.

Well, actually, no you cannot just ignore games that work just fine.  You are permitted to point out games with issues, but if the statistic is that this is the exception and not the norm (which is the case here), then you don't really have much a leg to stand on.  Seems more like you have an axe to grind, especially when your examples are also games with shoddy performance on all platforms.

WRT to that so-called-gate, if MS doesn't make the clear and easy "coop parity is important, not local-coop parity" then they deserve the PR hit. 

However, if people are being honest with themselves - they don't take only the negative examples into account (which are not increasing in numbner, actually, which is what we were told would oh so totally happen) , they take a look at all of the games, seeing if the negative examples are also negatives on the X/5/PC, and have an overall view of things over time.

But thats not what people tend to do with the Series S, and its certainly not what this thread is actually about.

And yet many wont down-talk the Series X or 5 for the times those two boxes aint doin 4k60 or have other issues that maybe get fixed with patches.

I see the point of this thread.

Yet FS2020 is memory bottlenecked, followed by cpu and gpu. You can use CPU to augment ram by calculating, generating stuff just in time, or you can use RAM to augment CPU by using pre-calculated tables kept in memory, or simply keep more in memory, load/prepare stuff ahead etc.

For example FS2020 first kept everything around you in RAM, used over 20GB of system ram with maximum draw distance. Turning the camera around was smooth, worked great. Then the XBox update came, memory use was massively reduced. How? By aggressively culling everything that's not in the current view. Result, massive stuttering when turning the camera around since all that geometry and detail had to be loaded again. At the time I made a work around by using the game's cache on a ram disk, basically keeping it in memory in a roundabout way.
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/rollingcache-revisited-essential-with-aggressive-culling-or-set-terrain-pre-caching-to-ultra/433841
You can see the difference already. It didn't really solve it as you still see it build up even fetching it from RAM disk to RAM. Luckily Asobo later gave the option to turn off the aggressive culling and on PC you can swing the camera around again without stuttering and pop up everywhere.

People getting a cheap option to play stuff like GTA 6 is nice even if it runs poorly but I am concerned about it being a headache for a lot of developers a few years from now. It's kinda like if developers were forced to have their games run properly on a 2060 till like 2031 if they were making a PC version. 

It depends on what MS and it's customers demand and expect. MS being a PC company for much longer than a console company, who's been trying to bridge the gap for quite some time now, very well doesn't or won't care as much as the gen goes on if the Series S games are far inferior to the Series X. As long as the games play well enough and aren't terribly broken and glitched, if you want better graphics and smoother framerates, find a way to upgrade to the higher tier X model.

There's also the possibility that as time goes on, if Series S continues to sell better, especially if the gap widens in it's favor, MS very well may ask devs to shift some effort from Series X to Series S. You wouldn't want to take too much away from your top tier X model, but if you've clearly got a much larger audience playing on the lower tier S model, it wouldn't be crazy to see MS ask to take a bit of the polish time away from X version games and use that time to improve S version games a bit.

The XB console space can work a lot like the PC space as you've mentioned, as long as the consoles remain much simpler to operate vs PC's. Offering a few different console game modes like performance vs resolution is about as far as it needs to go. As long as the lowest tier present gen console experience is just good enough, casual console gamers will accept it as long as the price is right. Some of them are even accepting it on last gens XB One right now, so present gens Series S would probably seem like a worthy upgrade to some of those casual gamers.

1440p at 60 fps with frame drops is not good at all, we've seen cross-gen games hitting 1800p-2160p at locked 60 fps on Series X and PS5. On top of that, the performance mode has dialed back graphical settings such as shorter level of detail distance, and for some reason the balanced mode between fidelity and performance mode requires HDMI 2.1 even though it never achieves framerates that would require HDMI 2.1 (HDMI 2.1 is only needed for 2160p at framerates higher than 60 fps, the balanced mode runs at like 1600p 40-50 fps as I recall, so there is no reason why it shouldn't run over HDMI 2.0). It's also not as well optimized on Series X as it is on PS5, likely due to the Sony marketing deal and 1 year exclusive content deal causing the devs to give PS5 more attention. 

I think the first generation Series S will be dropped (as a mandated SKU) in favor of a more powerful Series S+ (hopefully 75% more powerful, 12GB of RAM, bigger SSD). Unless Series S succeeds in appealing to a very large non-gamer or non-console-gamer demographic, I'd rather it not be mandated, because it would suck to see the more ambitious games in the early to mid 2030's being held back by Series S tech. It's bad enough that we're still stuck to Xbox One specs in the in early 2020's thanks to crossgen overstaying its welcome. I want the minimum spec to have as high a floor as economically possible. Series S can still get a ton of support without the need of being mandated, because the Switch 2 exists and it's going to be huge.

The reason Series S is the best selling Xbox is because the X isn't being produced in large enough volumes.

My primary concern with the S is that we're probably getting mid-gen upgrades in a few years. Mid-gen upgrades will allow developers to go crazier with games, that even Series X and PS5 will often struggle at sub 1080p/40 fps. There would be a limit to how much a developer can scale back on Series S before it gets ridiculous (challenging, unplayable, costly, time wasting, etc).