Dev: Xbox Series S is a 'Very Ambivalent Piece of Hardware' - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 02 October 2021 / 2,964 Views
The CEO and creative director at THE PARASIGHT in an interview with GamingBolt said the Xbox Series S, the weaker of the two new Xbox consoles, makes the new generation of consoles more affordable. However, he isn't sure if it will become a ball and chain when everyone moves over to developing exclusively for the new consoles.
"I think Series S is a very ambivalent piece of hardware. On the one hand, it makes the new generation much more affordable," said the CEO. "On the other hand, everyone has doubts as to whether it won’t be a ball and chain, especially when the next gen will kick off for good.
"Personally, I think that despite the obvious difference in the target resolution in the future, we may also witness setting scaling between series X and S."
THE PARASIGHT is developing the first-person action-adventure game, Blacktail, for the Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC via Steam.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Every Switch game has to scale between docked and portable modes, this shouldn't be radically different as the architecture is the same between the X and S.
The issue with Switch is Developers cannot access 40% of the systems power (or something like that) to allow for Docked mode resolution. Series S is just an X with less resolution when optimised correctly. The full protential is always available.
I don't see how Switch is any different in that regard; docked/X is more powerful than portable/S but they share the same architecture. All games must run on S/portable mode but when docked or on X extra power is available for higher resolution and settings.
True they are similar, i guess it just seems different as one has allocated power for Docked while the other has full access but has a lower GPU. It is basically the same thing.
Switch portable also has "full access" just at a lower GPU speed.
I want to see a tech demo made on just the Portable side of the Switch without the Dock mode just to see the full potential of the Switch's power.
No, that's not how it works. It's just limited clockspeeds to preserve battery life
It is at least a potential roadblock. What if devs want to make a game so demanding that Series X has to go 1080? I don't know, perhaps that is unrealistic. But I know that I'm glad my system of choice has one set of power (at least for now).
Weirdly enough, if at some point xbox has enough games in gamepass that interest me, I would consider buying an s over an x. Just to stream some cool games I heard of. Microsofts stradegy is interesting.
Since every game that releases on Xbox also releases on PC and there are still lots of PC's weaker than a Series S, I doubt the Series S will really hold the 9th gen back. Perhaps it will be a limitation in 5 years. But it's also in a dev it's best interest that their game can run on as many systems as possible.
Wow! An "ambivalent" piece of hardware. Who cares if it's sometimes sub 1080p? It's a sentient being! I wonder what other mental states it can experience.
having the same cpu has saved alot of optimising its just the gpu that will make the difference
Its the same when Nvidia or AMD make a Series of GPUs starting from the flagship to the affordable cards. The affordable cards dont hold back the PC market. Series X is the Flagship card and the Series S is the affordable card. Different story if the XB1X was the affordable base console instead of the Series S.
If it wasn't for the RAM I don't think there would be much concern. Otherwise, I hope the worst case scenario is some underwhelming ports for Series S due to the hardware struggling to play games in the future.
Ram is really a not a big issue.
The Series X and PS5 needs to dump Gigabytes of texture and mesh data into DRAM because it's pushing those higher resolutions, the Series S doesn't need to worry about that.
Would have been nice if the Series S had more memory... But it's not the limitation that many think it is, it's not great, but it's not the end of the world either.
Based on all the specs, I see RAM as a potential problem for titles in the future. If its not an issue, then the Series S should be fine until support ends.
The system also needs to be balanced out with the GPU and CPU. You dont want devs pushing the same amount of Ram on the Series X with the Series S GPU.
Doesn't it have like 8Gb of RAM? That's still a sizeable chunk for a machine that only does one thing at a time. I think the real problem is the existence of multiple platforms. More platforms == more optimisation, testing and debugging work. You always eventually hit the RAM limit and have to optimise your game design to load more from SSD. Now you have to deal with that happening at 12Gb and 8Gb...
Right, the concern is when games eventually start pushing memory to the limits. Simply put, a game pushing well above 8GB and relies on SSD tech to stream assets. That seems like a scenario where Series S could sturggle.
However, if that happened it would probably be a rare scenario. While 99% of software may never have that difficulty. It would be nice if the Series S simply had more memory even if it is slower. It would also mean less compromise on textures.
I still dont think it will weigh down the other 2 consoles. It has pretty much the same CPU as the Series X and exactly the same SSD.
It will add more development time, but it wont hold anything back as you'll just scale down resolution, even if that means sub 1080p
