Gamers have long known that the Xbox Series S would lower the financial entry barrier for the next console generation, but it’s been surprising many that Microsoft will be selling the Xbox Series S for just $299. That’s a pretty nice deal, especially compared to the Xbox Series X and its $499 price tag, but it’s gotten people wondering if this will end up holding back game development on Xbox in the long run.
It goes without saying that Microsoft had to make some sacrifices to make its budget console so affordable, something that has become apparent in the wake of the Series S’ official unveiling this week. While the Xbox Series X and Series S share many of the same basic specs, it’s the differences that people have been focusing on, leading to questions over whether developers will face difficulty trying to make sure games optimized for the Series X can run smoothly on the Series S.
But Gavin Stevens of indie studio Team Blur Games believes there shouldn’t be any difficulty, and dove into his reasoning in a lengthy Twitter thread yesterday. He admitted, however, that he hasn’t had any access to dev kits for either Xbox Series system, stating that his breakdown of how the Xbox Series S compares to the Series X is “based purely on experience and logic.” That said, he still made some interesting observations.
Starting off, he explained that while the Series S has a slight drop in CPU performance, it “likely won’t even use most of its power, as maxing out all 8 cores at full speed is a rarity.” Stevens went into greater detail breaking down the Xbox Series S’ GPU, but the gist is that despite being slower than the Series X overall, the GPU on the Series S is able to keep up since it doesn’t have to deal with processing 4K visuals.
If there’s anything that could prove problematic, Stevens said, it’ll probably be the Series S’ smaller and slower RAM, though he notes that the lower resolution will result in a “massive drop” in VRAM utilization. Another potential sticking point could lie in the fact that the Series S’ SSD will only sport around half the storage space of the Series X (512GB versus the Series X’s 1TB), which isn’t ideal for a digital-only console, or for owners who don’t want to pay extra to buy external storage cards for their next-gen Xbox.
Despite that, Stevens is confident in the Xbox Series S‘ capabilities. “So as a final answer to the question, is the Series S going to hold back game design or graphics for ANY next gen system? No, not in the slightest. Jason Ronald from Xbox already said it best: ‘games are made for Xbox Series X, then scaled down resolution to Xbox Series S.”
The Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X will launch on November 10.
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