Xbox Series S [XBSS] [Release November 10 2020]

And Kudos to them announcing pre-order and release dates and not doing some lottery to be deemed if you're worthy to preorder...

Only in the United States. It's like Sony HQ in Tokyo looked at the state of America and concluded, based on the state of the country, that American's all hate each other and want to make each other's lives more miserable and Sony rolled out a pre-order programme to help American's further achieve this goal.

That my theory that also happens to fit the facts. :runaway: I expect every North American PS5 box to include a bonus free angry rattlesnake. :yep2:
 
Shoulda been 2+2+2x2+2x2
Naw... that'd lead to the same split shenanigans as XSX but with even less gain. That would be 8GB @ 224GB/s + 4GB @ 112GB/s

Ideal would have been 6x2GB @ 336GB/s (192-bit), 84GB/TFLOP

From what I understand, 4Pro was bandwidth limited between its 218GB/s and 4.2TF (GCN). RDNA2 may be more forgiving with the updated cache hierarchy and greater L2 sizes, but then Zen 2 is going to be hungrier than Jaguar as well. I'm not entirely convinced that consoles this gen aren't bandwidth limited all around.

PS4 was about 95GB/TF.
4Pro & OneX were about 52-54GB/TF
PS5 >44GB/TF
XSX 46GB/TF
 
Last edited:
Did you mean that the other way around? I.e. 4x power to obtain 3x resolution?

As that's what we're essentially seeing here. I.e. 3x power (and 2.5x bandwidth) to obtain 2.25x the resolution (assuming we believe MS claims about 1440p).

I'm not sure that's reflected in the PC space taking the 1660 Ti and 2080Ti as examples (same architecture). The 1660 Ti is much closer to the 2080 Ti spec wise than the S is to the X, yet it can't match the 2080 Ti's 4k performance at 1440p from the limited samples I've seen. 1080p though is no problem.
4K is 4x the number of pixels than at 1080p right.

Yea I'm not really buying 1440p ;)
 
Radeon Image Sharpening method can play an important resolution role in Xbox Series consoles. Xbox Series S 1080p render with RIS = 1400p. and this is just the RDNA1 technique. ML upscaling is also coming.
 
4K is 4x the number of pixels than at 1080p right.

Yea I'm not really buying 1440p ;)

Perhaps that's the cap they expect for variable resolution to push for with most time close to 1080p.

With a reduction to other effects because of the lower output resolution perhaps they believe more titles might get towards that.

Of if PS5 remains lead console at 4k target this should get 1440p whilst X gets 4k plus extra tricks over the PS5?

There are probably as many market driven forces here as technical.
 
Perhaps that's the cap they expect for variable resolution to push for with most time close to 1080p.

With a reduction to other effects because of the lower output resolution perhaps they believe more titles might get towards that.

Of if PS5 remains lead console at 4k target this should get 1440p whilst X gets 4k plus extra tricks over the PS5?

There are probably as many market driven forces here as technical.
well, to be fair, a 1070 does 1440p@60 fairly well even with ultra/high settings.

And 1660TI and Series S are fairly close in spec. A 1660 may be more apt of a comparison if we're looking at raw performance, I'm not sure tbh.

And the 1660TI will beat out 1070 in both 1080p and 1440p benchmarks the more modern the game is.
Looking at Ass Odyssey as a proxy for Asshella : Series S should be able to run it at 60fps at 1080p. 1440p is going to need some adjustments ,
Article here: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-04-15-gtx-1660-ti-vs-gtx-1070-7001

So overall, I think we're supposed to assume medium settings for consoles. So there's quite a bit of wiggle room there on how much performance is available including other optimizations like VRS etc.
 
Last edited:
Perhaps that's the cap they expect for variable resolution to push for with most time close to 1080p.

With a reduction to other effects because of the lower output resolution perhaps they believe more titles might get towards that.

Of if PS5 remains lead console at 4k target this should get 1440p whilst X gets 4k plus extra tricks over the PS5?

There are probably as many market driven forces here as technical.
Indeed. XSS is more viable as a 1440p console if PS5 is the lead console at native 4k. Incidentally, the XSS has exactly half the bandwidth of the PS5.
 
4K is 4x the number of pixels than at 1080p right.

Yea I'm not really buying 1440p ;)
I think the problem will be when the developers want to push effects and IQ on the SeriesX and in the process have to lower rendering resolution down to 1440-1800p.
Where will the SeriesS fall into, in these games?


Though if recent dev statements are anything to go by, what they'll do this gen on Microsoft consoles is develop for the lower common denominator SeriesS first, and then scale up for the SeriesX.
So games will be made for a 4TFLOPs GPU rendering at 1080-1440p, and then the SeriesX siimply increases resolution and texture size above that.



Maybe I am missing something, but even a 1660 is faster than the 5500 XT, which is a 5.2 TF version of the Series S, discounting any IPC improvements in RDNA2.

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/evga-geforce-rtx-2060-ko/27.html
Curiously, we're also seeing the 5500XT (5TFLOPs RDNA1) getting about the same performance as a RX580 (6TFLOPs Polaris like the OneX) at 1080p.
Total bandwidth and CPU speed notwithstanding, SeriesS' GPU may not be as powerful as the OneX's, further giving us a sign that the SeriesS was never meant to be able to run OneX code.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Maybe I am missing something, but even a 1660 is faster than the 5500 XT, which is a 5.2 TF version of the Series S, discounting any IPC improvements in RDNA2.

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/evga-geforce-rtx-2060-ko/27.html
That benchmark for the 5500XT is the 4GB version.

The 8GB version performs in line with a 1660.
https://www.pcgamer.com/amd-radeon-rx-5500-xt-8gb-review/

The TI is out of range here. It's about ~12% faster. But console optimizations over PC might be able to close a 10% gap.
 
I think the problem will be when the developers want to push effects and IQ on the SeriesX and in the process have to lower rendering resolution down to 1440-1800p.
Where will the SeriesS fall into, in these games?

Though if recent dev statements are anything to go by, what they'll do this gen on Microsoft consoles is develop for the lower common denominator SeriesS first, and then scale up for the SeriesX.
So games will be made for a 4TFLOPs GPU rendering at 1080-1440p, and then the SeriesX siimply increases resolution and texture size above that.

Curiously, we're also seeing the 5500XT (5TFLOPs RDNA1) getting about the same performance as a RX580 (6TFLOPs Polaris like the OneX) at 1080p.
Total bandwidth and CPU speed notwithstanding, SeriesS' GPU may not be as powerful as the OneX's, further giving us a sign that the SeriesS was never meant to be able to run OneX code.
In the video Jason indicated that the Series X as the lead platform and scaled down. And that falls in line with targetting PS5 as a platform as well since they are very close together.

Which probably makes more sense if they are the exact same feature set. Usually you scale up if the better cards have features the older cards don't.

Yea, the hardware doesn't have enough cores to be able to do a workload of 4K nor the bandwidth.
In this review: https://www.pcgamer.com/amd-radeon-rx-5500-xt-8gb-review/
It shows that the 8GB version has room to grow. 1080p medium settings in most games it's doing quite well.
And that should be the target generally for consoles, we don't expect them to go to ultra quality.
 
Really curious how someone got hold of this briefing. Did the media get it prior to this week or did the leaker get hold of the video by some other means.
 
Back
Top