Xbox Series S [XBSS] (Lockhart) General Rumors and Speculation *spawn*

[wco81]

I understand the low price appeal. Would it play the same Series X games, just at the lower resolution and maybe some other lower levels of detail or frame rates?

That is the $70 games while the Xbox One X plays 4K games on $60 games?

Or would it not matter, because the 1080p image quality will be so good that once upscaled by TVs to 4K, it will be fine?

 

[AzBat]

If they ramp up Xbox One S manufacturing & it's still on the shelf next to the Series S, they will need a good way to differentiate between the 2. What better way than to put a big black circle on it? LOL

Wife thought it was ugly. I don't have a problem with it.

Tommy McClain

 

[iroboto]

I understand the low price appeal. Would it play the same Series X games, just at the lower resolution and maybe some other lower levels of detail or frame rates?

That is the $70 games while the Xbox One X plays 4K games on $60 games?

Or would it not matter, because the 1080p image quality will be so good that once upscaled by TVs to 4K, it will be fine?

Correct, it will play all the games at a lower graphical fidelity compared to Series X. I am not sure how it performs compared to Xbox One X.

 

[BRiT]

I understand the low price appeal. Would it play the same Series X games, just at the lower resolution and maybe some other lower levels of detail or frame rates?

Yes, likely lower resolution only. Doubtful on having lower frame rates, but that would be more a factor of them not scaling properly, like GPU compute or if they have some customized rendering algorithms that requires at least X TFs. This is roughly 33% the GPU performance targeting 25% the resolution and other resources.

 

[scently]

I think its clever of MS to advertise this as a 1440p machine. By and large, PS5 will be the lead platform assuming it retains the same lead created by the PS4 this gen (Sidenote, it will be interesting to see the effect XSS has on sales and if it will have an effect assuming its impulse buy status....). Anyway, XSS is much more a 1440p machine compared to the PS5 if we assume that most games, at least during this cross-gen period, will target native 4k.

 

[Rangers]

Correct, it will play all the games at a lower graphical fidelity compared to Series X. I am not sure how it performs compared to Xbox One X.

Will be really interesting to see how One X holds up, being that technically it still stacks up pretty darn well for it's age. However I dont see support continuing much beyond the normal 1-3 years to find out.

I suppose I'm planning on selling mine when I get an XSX, even though I dont expect it to fetch more than perhaps $100.

XSS seems overwhelmingly popular on forums and twitter, I am definitely in the huge minority here. I still do not like the concept and think it will die off, but maybe I'm wrong. I still see an even bigger issue of what to do when inevitably the big brother starts seeing price cuts, as it will be hard to reduce the XSS much, although the 512SSD will help I think.

While I do like the form factor, the idea of low resolutions means I just could never seriously consider an XSS as my only Xbox personally.

I know a guy who has literally like 10 Xbox One's alone. He's quite an odd fellow, he will buy many themed Xbox's for no real reason. I will definitely see him buying an XSS lol, just because it is different. He also has a One X, but claims to not enjoy using it because of the heat it outputs. Like I said, he's odd, lol.

 

[iroboto]

Will be really interesting to see how One X holds up, being that technically it still stacks up pretty darn well for it's age. However I dont see support continuing much beyond the normal 1-3 years to find out.

I suppose I'm planning on selling mine when I get an XSX, even though I dont expect it to fetch more than perhaps $100.

XSS seems overwhelmingly popular on forums and twitter, I am definitely in the huge minority here. I still do not like the concept and think it will die off, but maybe I'm wrong. I still see an even bigger issue of what to do when inevitably the big brother starts seeing price cuts, as it will be hard to reduce the XSS much, although the 512SSD will help I think.

While I do like the form factor, the idea of low resolutions means I just could never seriously consider an XSS as my only Xbox personally.

I know a guy who has literally like 10 Xbox One's alone. He's quite an odd fellow, he will buy many themed Xbox's for no real reason. I will definitely see him buying an XSS lol, just because it is different. He also has a One X, but claims to not enjoy using it because of the heat it outputs. Like I said, he's odd, lol.

Well there will be a trade in program I suspect, so keep an eye out for that. I will likely swap both my Xbox's if the trade in deal is good.

XSS is impulse purchase territory and I think that's what people wanted to be excited about. No one is excited about spending lots of money, I was dreading the 3000 RTX series reveal until prices were announced to be low for instance. I think a lot of people are very interested in game pass but they didn't want to pay the 599 sticker price to get in.

 

[Picao84]

That's a lot of arrogance for someone who is almost completely wrong.

Well, it was an answer to the statement that the number of rays casted can be controlled, which is obvious and, obviously as well, will lead to different results between XBSS and XBSX. You can't just have your cake and eat it too. It was a bit snarky I admit because I felt like it was just missing the point that I was never discussing performance or frames per second, I was discussing quality. We all know everything can be removed, diminished or bastardised to attain a certain level of performance (Nintendo Switch says hello). That's not new. What's new is having a low cost console with 1/3 of the "main" one in an era where RT is supposed to grow. Hell, a year ago or so people were still debating if next gen was going to have RT or not! And now suddenly the tables turned so much we expect a 4TF / 6TF to do RT fine? Based on what? Which AMD have we seen in the market doing RT? None. I'm sceptic and don't believe that simply reducing resolution will allow it to be anywhere close to XBSX. Like Function said Devs can cast less rays but I wonder if in the end it's worth to even bother when LH is so handicapped compared to Anaconda.

 

[Vega86]

Honestly I think this is a terrible idea. It cheapens the brand and won't really have an audience. It won't get much, if any notable media attention and any marketing efforts put into are money that could have been spent promoting the flagship.

This won't be a much of a disaster as Kinect and the TV focus of Xbox One (with poor execution mind you) but it's completely unnecessary.

Add in this for a center speaker.

Perfect. Fits right under most TVs.

 

[AzBat]

Perfect. Fits right under most TVs.

Might be able to mount it on the back of the TV. It's the width a controller.

Tommy McClain

 

[Pressure]

The price is certainly surprising.

Perhaps they are salvaging SoCs that didn't quite make the cut for the big Xbox instead of throwing them in the bin?

 

[tunafish]

The price is certainly surprising.

Perhaps they are salvaging SoCs that didn't quite make the cut for the big Xbox instead of throwing them in the bin?

They can also do that, but that alone wouldn't produce nearly enough to justify the demand. Mostly, this console is just a cost-reduced version with a little less everything, and as it lacks an optical drive, they are probably banking on a higher profit per game sold, so are willing to take less profit/more loss on the unit itself.

 

[iroboto]

The price is certainly surprising.

Perhaps they are salvaging SoCs that didn't quite make the cut for the big Xbox instead of throwing them in the bin?

no possible way you can achieve those types of savings with binning, at least not in the volumes that the Series S will sell at. There are other devices that could use the binned chips.

 

[wco81]

Perhaps they're expecting a big uptake of the monthly plans?

So the XSS would be more appealing since it can be amortized at $25 a month vs. more for the XSX?

 

[dobwal]

They can also do that, but that alone wouldn't produce nearly enough to justify the demand. Mostly, this console is just a cost-reduced version with a little less everything, and as it lacks an optical drive, they are probably banking on a higher profit per game sold, so are willing to take less profit/more loss on the unit itself.

The console is limited to digital purchases. As I said before you can't make use of used, borrowed, or rented physical-based games. So literally everything you play on the digital only console will provide MS or Sony at least a 30% cut.

 

[BRiT]

Well possibly only a 10% cut to Microsoft depending on the situation since the user could be subscriber to Game Pass which provides a 20% discount. Not sure if that's completely the way they work it, but I could see that happening. As opposed to offering a 20% discount and then Microsoft still taking 30% cut of the discounted price.

For games and DLC not on Game Pass, yes Microsoft would get its typical 30% cut.

 

[milk]

Well, it was an answer to the statement that the number of rays casted can be controlled, which is obvious and, obviously as well, will lead to different results between XBSS and XBSX. You can't just have your cake and eat it too. It was a bit snarky I admit because I felt like it was just missing the point that I was never discussing performance or frames per second, I was discussing quality. We all know everything can be removed, diminished or bastardised to attain a certain level of performance (Nintendo Switch says hello). That's not new. What's new is having a low cost console with 1/3 of the "main" one in an era where RT is supposed to grow. Hell, a year ago or so people were still debating if next gen was going to have RT or not! And now suddenly the tables turned so much we expect a 4TF / 6TF to do RT fine? Based on what? Which AMD have we seen in the market doing RT? None. I'm sceptic and don't believe that simply reducing resolution will allow it to be anywhere close to XBSX. Like Function said Devs can cast less rays but I wonder if in the end it's worth to even bother when LH is so handicapped compared to Anaconda.

Pretty much all implementations of RT in games so far have been completely connected to the frame buffer's resolution. Most effects are spawning rays for every render-target pixel, or every other one, or 1/4 etc. That means all those games RT tracing performance cost will be reduced "automatically" proportionally with resolution reductions*, in direct oposition to your assumptions that just because rays are traced in world-space they bare no correlation to render-res. Your point was simply wrong. Not just wrong, you were claiming EXACTLY the OPOSITE of what is actually a fact. And snarkly so.

*the exception being acceleration structure build. That will have the same cost irrespective of resolution, geometry density is what matters in this case. If most of that is baked and streamed from storage, the cost will be low. If it's dynamic, it could pose a problem.

**Ray tracing probes distributed in worldspace is resolution independent, but also is not an aproach used by any game so far.

 

[Jay]

*the exception being acceleration structure build. That will have the same cost irrespective of resolution, geometry density is what matters in this case. If most of that is baked and streamed from storage, the cost will be low. If it's dynamic, it could pose a problem.

How often is that done on the cpu the way that cryengine is doing it?
For some reason I thought that was done on cpu in many implementations anyway.

 

[mrcorbo]

I still see an even bigger issue of what to do when inevitably the big brother starts seeing price cuts, as it will be hard to reduce the XSS much, although the 512SSD will help I think.

I disagree, especially with no optical drive. I think this should cost reduce quite nicely over time.

 

[iroboto]

How often is that done on the cpu the way that cryengine is doing it?
For some reason I thought that was done on cpu in many implementations anyway.

Common. Prior to RT cores, CPUs were fairly competent at RT when compared
to GPUs as I understand it.