If it was 1440p@30 with dips below 25, I would've said so, but both modes target 60, and 1440p@60 isn't uncommon. 

But 900p@30fps is less common, more Switch territory.

I mean what's the point of advertising it as day one game pass game if it wouldn't run great on the system. 

Same issue with Atomic Heart actually.

The only thing that would be an actual cause of concern is if 3rd party games skip Xbox entirely because of the Series S. That has not been the case. If that doesn't happen and games keep coming to Xbox, the Series S was worth it for MS and owners. Games running below 1080P isn't a concern. Anyone who uses the Series S for what it is, doesn't care. They would have bought a Series X or PS5 if they did.

Devs have been having to deal with underpowered systems for decades, it literally their job to figure this stuff out. 

The series X and PS5 can't even target 1440p with lock 60 wit dips in the 40s so its kind of ridicoulous to expect 1440p 30 from series S. Best I see is 1080p 30 but they decided with 900p 60.

They also decided 900p@30 for fidelity mode.

Anyway, I think we both said what we had to say on the matter, let's agree to disagree

I haven't read this thread but personal opinion, I wouldn't touch a series S. Go all in with the X or ps5.

From a profit and game development costs perspective, it certainly makes sense to see the Xbox Series S getting much less care from devs on multiplats that aren't on Gamepass simply because they know these games would largely sell best on the competitor platforms.

Less profit potential leads to less devs ressources to optimize these games on the weaker platform.

Not always done on the CPU.
And considering with RDNA you aren't geometry limited like Graphics Core Next, it's not going to be the bottleneck it once was.

In Unity for example, you can make use of the Tessellator on a modern GPU to deform the mesh rather than require a high vertex count at all times.
See here: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SL-SurfaceShaderTessellation.html


But it all comes down to the developer, the more you shift the load onto the GPU, the better.

Are you talking about procedural generation?

Culling has been a tactic that has been used in some form for decades now... Most prominently since the Radeon 7500 in 2000 with ATI's HyperZ technology which was a set of technologies that worked together.

Obviously today it's more advanced where culling can be "predicted" ahead of time.

It helps no doubt.

Texture and Mesh streaming started to gain more traction during the 7th gen, most notably with Modern Warfare 2 in order to circumvent the ram limits of those consoles at the time... With SSD's that can obviously be taken to the next level, especially with lots of small random textures streamed. (Optical/Mechanical drives hated small random reads.)

In the unreal engine, if you don't have enough high quality textures in dram, the textures will be mip to the lowest level, until the quality versions of the texture are streamed into memory... Hence the "texture pop-in" effect you often see with Unreal powered games... It's more or less because the developers tried to push things out to far and didn't have the memory to cache.

Shouldn't run "poorly". - That tends to be all relative though. - I have seen people who are perfectly happy playing their games at 15-20fps.

Grand Theft Auto hasn't exactly pushed the graphics envelope for a long time now, so Rockstar tend to be a little more conservative on hardware requirements, prioritising gameplay over visual effects with that title.

Even if the game ends up being 900P, 30fps... I think that is more than acceptable for the Series S.

I understand and agree fully, but Consoles tend to be supported for the entire generation.

I always want the graphics bar to be raised more, I would have liked to have seen the Series X and Playstation 5 to offer more hardware, but the current climate didn't allow for it, hence the mid range hardware.

The Series S has been a success for Microsoft, so it is not going away.

@Permalite Procedural generation can be used to save memory, but more so on disk since you still need all that procedurally generated stuff in memory. The simplest way for CPU to help RAM is to keep all data compressed in memory. For textures that's done by the GPU nowadays, yet world data can also be kept compressed and decoded on the fly. That's what we did when I still worked in GPS navigation. All the map data was compressed to the max with hash tables for random access, loading in chunks at a time to decode while searching or rendering the map. All with efficient memory use, storing everything in RAM with as few bits as necessary. More work for the CPU to decode and encode all the time, yet RAM was the bottleneck. For games, think of Minecraft data all being compressed in memory to allow for bigger worlds.

And the other way around RAM can help the CPU by keeping more stuff around and pre-loading / preparing stuff when time left over. So for procedural generation, more RAM allows you to work ahead, buffering basically. Thus when the user decides to sprint ahead, you already have it available. Culling is great for rendering, but as FS2020 showed, actually throwing away the data from memory is problematic when you look around. It's fine if you stare straight ahead all the time, yet for example in VR you can't purge the world behind the user as you can look around at any time. (Well you can in most games)

And yep SSD and direct to video ram loading helps. I still found using a ram disk for cache faster than SSD, but just leaving it in RAM (turning off the aggressive culling in FS2020, which they mistakingly named pre-chaching, works the best obviously. It's more post-caching if you leave the stuff behind in ram until it's out of range. Anyway just means do do double work in the end)

More RAM also makes development easier and faster. Optimization is hard work and easy to introduce hard to trace bugs. Pointer arithmetic for example is great way to optimize code and reduce memory use, but so easy to introduce hard to find fatal errors.

I hoping this will make developers with common sense to stop making xblocks entirely and just focus on PS5/PC, cause us true gamers wouldn't want developers waste money, time and frustrations just to appease the minority whiners...

This idea that developers will skip the Xbox consoles because of requirement to release on the Series S is ridiculous. Developers are businesses. They will do whatever the numbers tell them to do. If there are a large number of Xbox consoles in existence, and it appears that there will be, they will do whatever they have to do to get the games to run on those consoles.

Maybe this will impact the math for devs/pubs enough to make it a teeny tiny bit cheaper for Sony to pay for exclusivity for games. But, that's going to be a very marginal issue.  

The argument that Series S will hold back the entire generation is more reasonable. Developers will know that they must make their game run on Series S. So, they might not do things that they otherwise would if they only had to worry about PS5 and Series X.