Microsoft finally confirmed the existence of the Xbox Series S on Tuesday, and a day later, the company unveiled the hardware specifications of its smaller, cheaper next-generation console. At $ 299, the Series S seems like a great value proposition for people who don’t care about physical games or 4K resolution.
The main thing to know about the Series S is that it is built to play all the next-game games like its more powerful brother, the Xbox Series X, except for the 1440p lower target resolution than the 4K. Both consoles can play games at a frame rate of 120 frames per second. And the Series S will still deliver the same visual fidelity as the Series X, according to MicroStft – it’s capable of hardware-accelerated real-time ray tracing, variable-rate shading and mesh shaders. It will also upset the native-resolution output to 4K.
“By creating two consoles in parallel from the start, we can give the same core gaming experience, while making it as easy for developers to make their game as easy as possible on both consoles with minimal effort,” said Jason Ronald, Director of Program Management. For the Xbox, in the deep dive video for the Xbox Series S, “this means that the Xbox Series S delivers the same incredible pay-per-view experience and features like the Series X – just at low rendering resolution.”
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Image: micro .ft
The Xbox Series S delivers 4 teraflops of graphics performance, which means that on paper, it is 33% less powerful than the Xbox One X (console of the Beefist current pay generation, at 6 teraplops) and 67 67% less powerful than the Xbox Series X. . But it manages to deliver the same performance as the Series X because of the way it is built by Microsfat: in addition to the graphics presentation features mentioned above, it provides the Series X with “equal I / O performance” courtesy of its solid state. Drive and Xbox Velocity Architecture. This means that Series S owners will also see, among other benefits, similar improvements in loading time as the Series X.
In terms of specifications, the Xbox Series S has “the same eight-core Zen2 CPU architecture as the Xbox Series X,” Ronald said, except for the down clock to run at a constant frequency of 6.6 GHz instead of down.cl GHz. (With simultaneous multithreading enabled, the Series S CPU will run at 4.4 GHz instead of the Series X’s 6.6 GHz.) The Series S GPU contains 30 fewer compute units instead of 52૨ and runs at a slower frequency of 1.565 GHz. 1.825 GHz of Series X. According to MicroS.ft, lower raw numbers do not lag far behind the Series S, as the “virtual memory multipliers” provided by the Xbox Velocity architecture.
The system target of 1440p “corresponds to the target resolution”, Ronald said: The Series S, with a low memory bandwidth, has 10 GBDDR6 RAM instead of the 16 GB of the Series X. Another big difference is the internal storage. While both consoles deliver the same storage bandwidth – 2.4 GB per second for uncompressed data and 4.8 GB / sec read speed for compressed data – the SSD in the Series S is half the size of the Series X, instead of 512 GB 1 TB. That could be a key point for the digital L-Digital Series S, with many modern games growing closer to the 100GB mark, with storage requirements if not top notch.
That’s right – a key Xbox Series X feature that lacks the Series S is an optical drive. These days, most games are sold digitally (a trend that has accelerated the COVID-19 epidemic). Owners of the Next-Gen Xbox will be able to bump up the console’s internal storage by purchasing a 1TB storage expansion card, but Microsoft has not disclosed the price of the proprietary device manufactured by Seagate. The console will support USB external hard drives, but you’ll only be able to play backward-compatible Xbox, Xbox 360, and Xbox One games from external storage – next-gen games, must be installed on internal SSDs or on storage expansion. Card.
Leaving a 4K Blu-ray drive is a way to reduce costs for micro .ft. And even though it won’t be able to play games or Blu-ray movies, the Xbox Series S will support 4K video output for streaming services, just as the Series X will. In fact, Microsoft announced on Wednesday that both consoles will support Dolby Vision HDR at launch time for services like Disney Plus, Netflix and Wadu. The next-gen console will also get Dolby Vision support for games somewhere in 2021, and both have HDMI 2.1 output for cutting edge video features such as variable refresh rate and auto to low-latency mode.
Both the Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X will launch worldwide on November 10. Pre-orders will go live on September 22nd.
