Can Xbox One continue as the low-end gaming console option?

For months, Microsoft has been talking about increasing raw power coming to consoles courtesy of the Xbox Series X. At the same time, however, Microsoft is encouraging internal and external studios to make X-Series games. keep them going for seven years. old Xbox One hardware too.

“As our content comes out over the next year, two years, all of our games, more or less like PC, will play up and down on that family of devices,” Xbox Game Studios boss Matt Booty said in an interview. in January with MCV. “We want to make sure that if someone invests in Xbox between now and [Series X] that they feel they made a good investment and that we are committed to them with the content. “

Does that mean developers will have to contain their truly “next generation” ideas to accommodate gamers with outdated consoles? Microsoft’s Xbox Chief Phil Spencer doesn’t think so. In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz last week, Spencer also referred to the PC gaming ecosystem as an analogy to explain how Xbox One support would continue to work:

I just look at Windows. It is almost certain that if the developer is creating a Windows version of their game, then the most powerful and highest fidelity version is the PC version. You can even see that with some of our first-party console games going to PC, even from our competitors, that the richest version is the PC version. However, the PC ecosystem is the most diverse when it comes to hardware, when you think of the CPUs and GPUs from years ago that are there.

Is Xbox One similar to a 2013 PC?

For PC gamers, there is some comfort inherent in the idea of ​​Xbox One as the new goal of “minimum specs” for developers in the console space. But that idea got us thinking: Would seven-year-old hardware still be considered minimally acceptable in the PC gaming world?

To test that theory, we took a trip down memory lane and revisited our November 2013 Ars system guide, which offered our best recommendations for low, mid, and high-end PC builds at the time. For our relative Xbox One comparison, we used the “Hot Rod” midrange box, which had a Radeon R9 280X GPU and 8GB of RAM. That system cost around $ 1,400 in late 2013, or closer to $ 1,000 without the monitor, speakers, mouse, and keyboard.

To see if that system would hold up today, we compared it to the minimum and recommended specifications for a variety of recent and future high-end PC games. To make relative comparisons between our build and the specs suggested by today’s developer, we compared the clock speed and the number of cores for the CPUs and used 3DMark’s “Fire Strike” benchmarks for GPUs. For RAM, we simply compare the amounts directly.

Minimum specifications for modern games vs. 2013 Ars “Hot Rod”

The results of this quick and dirty analysis show that Spencer is more or less correct; PC developers have still been tweaking their games to mid-range hardware since 2013 when it comes to “minimal” specs. Sets Doom Eternal to Horizon Zero Dawn They only require the 8GB of RAM and the kind of i5 CPU that we recommended for our build back then. In terms of GPUs, the R9 280X we recommend scored 8221 from 3dMark’s Fire Strike, which meets or exceeds 3DMark’s scores of the “minimum” GPUs required for the games we saw.

The only major exception to this general rule is virtual reality. A high-end virtual reality game like Half-Life Alyx It requires a total of 12GB of RAM and a Radeon RX 580, both of which easily outperform our 2013 mid-range build. But if you’re investing in tethered virtual reality these days, you’re probably not happy with a PC tower from around 2013 anyway.

Recommended specifications for modern games vs. 2013 Ars “Hot Rod”

While our seven-year-old system is still minimally acceptable for PC gaming, it is well below the “recommended” standard that most developers are setting for modern titles. Four of the eight games we saw now suggest 16GB of RAM as a recommended specification, for example, instead of the 8GB that was sufficient in 2013. And the i5 processor in our previous version has quite a bit of power compared to the i7 processors that are recommended these days (although that difference might not be very noticeable for games that aren’t limited by the CPU).

That 8221 3DMark score for our R9 280X doesn’t look as good these days either. Today’s high-end games recommend GPUs that generally score 10,000 to 14,000 at that benchmark. Trying to get mid-range performance from our seven-year-old GPU in today’s titles will be a struggle, to say the least.

What it means for Xbox

Just as a seven-year-old “average” PC can still beat the bar for “minimal” modern PC gaming, an Xbox One should still serve as a minimal console gaming solution for now. And while Xbox One versions of the new titles won’t be able to take advantage of advancements like X-Series Speed ​​Architecture, developers should be able to target older hardware for now.

The question, then, becomes what the future holds. Our 2013 gaming platform will surely not meet the developer’s minimum spec targets sometime in the coming years. Similarly, support for old Xbox One hardware will start to seem like a pretty silly idea to console game developers sometime soon, no matter how much Microsoft fosters cross-generation compatibility.

Spencer acknowledged this to some extent in his recent interview with GI.biz:

Yes, every developer will find a line and say that this is the hardware that I am going to support, but the diversity of PC hardware options has not slowed down the highest fidelity PC games on the market. Higher fidelity PC games rival anything anyone has seen in video games. So this idea that developers don’t know how to build games, game engines, or ecosystems that run on a set of hardware … there is a test point on the PC that shows that is not the case.

Of course, once our 2013 PC becomes more or less “outdated” for gaming, the owner can simply add more RAM or a new GPU for a relatively cheap service upgrade that could take years. In the case of the Xbox One, players will have to start again with a new relatively high X-Series. The Xbox One X could serve as a cheaper temp solution, perhaps, but Microsoft’s recent discontinuation of that half-generation hardware suggests it doesn’t want customers to consider that upgrade option for long.

All told, the console update cycle has always worked this way, with old hardware gradually phased out in favor of a new de facto standard for a few years. However, with the extreme intergenerational focus on the current Xbox family, analogies with the multi-level PC gaming space are becoming increasingly explicit.