Will the Xbox Series S slow down next-gen gaming?

Microsoft unveiled its Xbox Series S console last week, aiming to offer cheaper next-gen games for $ 299. The console is specifically targeting 1440p resolution rather than 4K, which raises some lingering questions and confusion about how well it will play next-gen games. There are concerns about GPU performance, memory, and whether the S Series could hold the next-gen games. I had the opportunity to speak with Jason Ronald, Microsoft’s director of Xbox program management, to delve into what’s really going on with Xbox Series S.

The biggest difference between the larger Xbox Series X and the Xbox Series S, aside from size and design, is the GPU inside. The Xbox Series S has 4 teraflops of GPU performance, compared to 12.15 teraflops for the Xbox Series X. The smaller console also has less RAM (10GB instead of 16GB) which also runs slower than the X Series. of that, the S Series runs the same X Series CPU at a slightly slower speed and has 512GB of SSD storage instead of 1TB.

Some of the changes Microsoft has made to accommodate a cheaper S Series console have sparked a lot of debate as to whether this console will retain next-gen games overall. “Really annoying about this RAM situation on the S Series,” said Axel Gneiting, lead engine programmer at id Software, in a now-deleted tweet. “This is not easy to compensate for and somewhat reduces the basic specifications for the next generation multiplatform.”

Billy Khan, lead engine developer at id Software, shared Gneiting’s concerns. “The memory situation is a big problem on the S,” Khan said in another deleted tweet. “The much smaller amount of memory and divided memory banks with drastically slower speeds will be a major problem. Aggressively reducing rendering resolutions will help marginally, but will not completely offset shortcomings. “

Sasan Sepehr, Senior Technical Producer for Remedy Entertainment, also shared a brief concern. “As a consumer, I love it,” he said. Sepher on Twitter. “As a technical producer, I see problems.”

All of these concerns seem reasonable. On paper, the memory and GPU differences seem like big gaps, but the reality is a bit more complicated when you consider that Microsoft is targeting 1440p resolutions on the S Series, not the 4K that the Xbox Series is designed for. X.

“We did a lot of analysis of what it would really mean to run a game at 4K 60fps and then downsize it to 1440p at 60fps,” says Jason Ronald, Microsoft’s director of Xbox program management, in an interview with The edge. “The reality is that you don’t need as much memory bandwidth because you’re not loading the highest-level MIP levels into memory. You don’t need the same amount of memory. “

Microsoft believes that developers have various ways of creating Xbox Series X games for 4K resolutions and then downsizing them to 1440p for S Series. “Developers have a lot of different techniques, whether it’s changing the resolution of your title, things like dynamic Frame-by-frame resolution scaling – that’s something we’ve seen a lot in adoption, especially towards the end of this generation, ”explains Ronald. “And obviously the ability to enable and display different visual effects, without actually implementing the core gameplay.”

All of this is particularly relevant when both consoles share nearly identical CPU and I / O performance, something that has hampered existing consoles. Microsoft focused on improving GPU performance with its Xbox One X, even using the 6 teraflops as a marketing point over the 4.2 teraflops on the PS4 Pro.

The Xbox One X had a terrible bottleneck at both the CPU and I / O level. Microsoft effectively introduced a more capable GPU inside a device that still runs a laptop-like CPU and spinning hard drive. It was almost handling 4K, but the CPU really prevented many games from hitting 60fps.

So how will the Xbox Series S compare to the previous Xbox One X? It’s easy to look at raw teraflops numbers and immediately think that 6 teraflops is better than 4 teraflops, but it’s more complicated than that. The Xbox Series S runs AMD’s latest RDNA 2.0 architecture, while the Xbox One X was based on AMD’s older GCN architecture.

“With RDNA 2 we basically get a 25 percent performance increase over GCN without any developer work,” says Ronald. “There is a significant amount of efficiency that we are getting from RDNA2 relative to GCN. Then we look at other things, like using float 16 or variable rate shadowing, and we also see return benefits on the order of 10 to 20 percent. “

That should mean that the raw GPU performance on the Xbox Series S is similar to that of the Xbox One X, but the target resolution is 1440p instead of 4K. That’s why the Xbox Series S will play games designed and improved for the larger Xbox Series X, along with the Xbox One S versions of games that have not been modified in place of the Xbox One X enhanced titles.

“It’s really hard to compare raw numbers like teraflops between generations, because we think of them differently,” says Ronald. “Overall on the GPU side, the Xbox Series S has effectively the same performance as an Xbox One X GPU, but it brings all the next-gen features like ray tracing, VRS, mesh shaders, and obviously when you look at the massive jumps in CPU performance and I / O performance, that’s why the Xbox Series S is designed to deliver that true next-gen experience with a lower resolution than Xbox Series X. “

CPU upgrades and the addition of an SSD for the Xbox Series S will mean that games will run much better than ever on the Xbox One X. “There are also opportunities where we can improve titles on Xbox Series S even more than what we can do on Xbox One X, “says Ronald. “If you look at the raw power of the Xbox Series S, if a title wants to come in and double its frame rates, it’s really very easy, because we have more than doubled the performance of the GPU and more than doubled the performance of the CPU. , so it’s relatively easy for a developer to go in and enable that if they decide to update their title. “

Microsoft has certainly changed its approach for this generation of Xbox consoles to focus more on frame rates and load times, rather than just graphical improvements. 4K is supported by Xbox Series S through upscaling, and Microsoft is working at the display driver level for higher image quality and improved color correction for sharper, more accurate images when scaling games.

There’s no great 8K approach or guarantee for Xbox Series S or Xbox Series X, which is good. Consoles have promised 1080p or 4K performance before and failed to hit high frame rates for smooth gameplay. “Historically, console generations have really been defined by the way they look,” says Ronald. “Much of this generation is going to be how will they feel? How do they play? When you think about these big open worlds and keeping gamers immersed in them, I don’t want to go in, I don’t want loading times. ”Ronald says that smooth and buttery gameplay will be a priority for Microsoft over the generation of these two consoles.

Microsoft also relies on a technique called sample feedback streaming on Xbox Series S and X to improve SSD bandwidth efficiency. Streaming sampler feedback gives developers much more control over how data is sent to the GPU for rendering, which means that only the textures a GPU needs for a scene will be loaded into memory. This should provide some significant performance improvements on its own.

“When we think about Xbox speed architecture or sample feedback streaming, those are areas where we expect a lot of innovation across the generation,” explains Ronald. “With something like the feedback stream from the sampler, it can deliver performance well beyond raw hardware specs. Much of this generation has to do with efficiency. “

So is this Xbox Series S really going to put off next-gen games? Probably not. “No, it’s not [going to hold back next-gen], ” says Gavin Stevens, co-owner and chief designer of independent studio Team Blur Games. “Anyone with a little experience will tell you.” The reality is that the Xbox Series S will require developers to balance and scale their games as many already do on a variety of PC gaming hardware and existing Xbox and PlayStation consoles.

There is also the reality of existing consoles like Xbox One and PS4 that could affect future games as, unlike the Xbox Series S, there are serious CPU limitations to fix. Microsoft has promised that Xbox Game Studios titles that will be released “in the next few years” will also be available on Xbox One. Sony, on the other hand, seemed to be focused on PS5-exclusive games like Marvel’s. Spider-Man: Miles Morales and West horizon forbidden, but the company is now releasing them on the PS4 as well. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart It’s not listed for a PS4 version, and it looks like a game that really takes advantage of the PS5’s SSD and would be a challenge to run on PS4 hardware.

Many of the hardware and efficiency improvements will need developers to really take advantage of. While there may be concerns about some of Microsoft’s options, it will take some time before we see developers familiarize themselves with hardware changes and optimize games accordingly. This is how generations of consoles have always worked.

The difference in this generation is that if Microsoft’s promises for the Xbox Series S and X are fulfilled, we could be facing a console period that really favors frame rate and visual quality over pure resolution. The Xbox Series S might be the best representation of exactly that, allowing gamers to get the higher frame rates that many want to see in the next generation of games.