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

[mpg1]

Phil already talked about input from the azure team, and it being used for offer workloads when it's not busy

Interesting.

 

[eastmen]

Completely different. A console has games written for it. A simpler version of a console means games won't target the better version 100%. So in your example, people would mind a cheaper model Mercedes if it meant the race-tracks were designed for that cheaper Merc and didn't push the expensive Merc to its limits. owners of the expensive Merc would be disappointed that all the race tracks were a little limited and they couldn't see what their car could really do.

Now there's a big debate as to just how much the flagship model will be held back, if to any noticeable degree, but the product comparisons you make are invalid because the console market is (currently) unique in how it works. You buy one console from one side (most people won't have multiple machines) and it'll last 7+ years and you want the best from it and devs to make the most of it. I can't off the top of my head think of any comparables, because of the closed ecosystems, the way software can be optimised for specific systems, and the long product lifespans. All other products are interchangeable and replaceable with alternatives.

If consoles move over to frequent iterations like a phone or PC/Mac, then it will become a product family where people won't mind there being tiers of product. Until that happens, the Lockhart 'hate', even if it doesn't amount to much, is at least understandable.

Wont there being a PS5 that has lower specs automatically hold back the Xbox series x ? The only major change to the rumored LH is that it has lower gpu power but at the same time its not targeting the same resolution.

Do consoles last 7+ years ? Ps4 lasted what 3 years ? xbox one 4 ?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Wont there being a PS5 that has lower specs automatically hold back the Xbox series x ?

It's only first/second party games the concerned people would be concerned about. For cross platform titles, the lowest common denominator, whether console or lower-spec PC, will be the limiting factor for game design.

The only major change to the rumored LH is that it has lower gpu power but at the same time its not targeting the same resolution.

The less different it is, the less the price delta will be, unless MS are for some reason willing to massively subsidise it.

Do consoles last 7+ years ? Ps4 lasted what 3 years ? xbox one 4 ?

Huh? No-one's stopped making games targeting XB1 and PS4. The specs laid down 7 years ago have limited game design for 6 TF mid-gen consoles and 10 TF, 16+ GB PCs. They are the lowest common denominator and if they were dropped, developers could target far more powerful machines such as 8+ TF PCs as a minimum.

 

[eastmen]

It's only first/second party games the concerned people would be concerned about. For cross platform titles, the lowest common denominator, whether console or lower-spec PC, will be the limiting factor for game design.

The less different it is, the less the price delta will be, unless MS are for some reason willing to massively subsidise it.

Huh? No-one's stopped making games targeting XB1 and PS4. The specs laid down 7 years ago have limited game design for 6 TF mid-gen consoles and 10 TF, 16+ GB PCs. They are the lowest common denominator and if they were dropped, developers could target far more powerful machines such as 8+ TF PCs as a minimum.

The hardware features would have parity. Just one will run the game at 1080p and one at 4k or whatever the resolutions end up being. There shouldn't be any other differences between the games out side of obvious texture quality going down to match the lower resolution target

Your talking about a huge diffrence in gpu performance which is whats driving the majority of power consumption and heat. Your going from a 12tflop gpu to a 5 tflop gpu. Your also dumping 4 gigs of ram , moving to possibly a diffrent bus for the ram and then smaller less complex motherboards , simpler cooler , smaller device. The ripples from all that will affect pricing everywhere

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Your going from a 12tflop gpu to a 5 tflop gpu. Your also dumping 4 gigs of ram , moving to possibly a diffrent bus for the ram and then smaller less complex motherboards...

So the differences aren't just the GPU.

Again, I'm not arguing that there will be a significant impact on XBSX games. I only stepped in to point out your parallel with other items wasn't applicable because consoles occupy a presently unique space. And in the case of LH being cheaper, the higher the price delta between it and XBSX, the greater the differences in hardware meaning potentially the more impact on XBSX games that have to limit themselves to the lower spec. That may or may not be the case, but that's the concern of the Concerned and those concerns aren't dismissed by looking at other products where the Concerned aren't concerned, such as different tiers of TV or car or toaster or phone.

 

[eastmen]

So the differences aren't just the GPU.

Again, I'm not arguing that there will be a significant impact on XBSX games. I only stepped in to point out your parallel with other items wasn't applicable because consoles occupy a presently unique space. And in the case of LH being cheaper, the higher the price delta between it and XBSX, the greater the differences in hardware meaning potentially the more impact on XBSX games that have to limit themselves to the lower spec. That may or may not be the case, but that's the concern of the Concerned and those concerns aren't dismissed by looking at other products where the Concerned aren't concerned, such as different tiers of TV or car or toaster or phone.

why would it be a concern ? If you have two pieces of hardware that both supported the same features and the more powerful console was targeting 8.3m pixels per frame and one 2.01m pixels frame. Then where is the difference ? as long as they are capable of displaying the same image within their target resolution then for a developer there shouldn't be any issue. That's before factoring and frame rate differences they might allow

 

[Shifty Geezer]

For the sake of argument, what if the CPU is clocked lower and that limits the in game physics as a result? Or the RAM is less and they limit some world quality thing? That an XSBX only title would be 24 racers but it ends up being 16 cars as that's as many as LH can support?

However, I'm not debating that! With no idea what the HW differences are, we can't even guess at if it'll be impactful or not. I'm just saying it's a different situation to other devices where people don't complain.

 

[BRiT]

For the sake of argument, what if the CPU is clocked lower and that limits the in game physics as a result?

Lower than the other console or just lower than the Series X?

 

[Proelite]

For the sake of argument, what if the CPU is clocked lower and that limits the in game physics as a result? Or the RAM is less and they limit some world quality thing? That an XSBX only title would be 24 racers but it ends up being 16 cars as that's as many as LH can support?

Even without Lockhart, XBSX only titles are probably not going to happen.

Xsx to Lockhart is much smaller gap for devs than from Xsx to PS5 or Xsx to PC.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Lower than Series X - MS's first party titles will be targeting the lowest denominator for the platforms they are interested. In the case of a classical console, that'd be XBSX. If those first party games also target other machines like a rumoured LH, that now sets the baseline to something numerically lower than XBSX.

 

[Proelite]

Lower than Series X - MS's first party titles will be targeting the lowest denominator for the platforms they are interested. In the case of a classical console, that'd be XBSX. If those first party games also target other machines like a rumoured LH, that now sets the baseline to something numerically lower than XBSX.

The lowest denominator will be potato PCs. All games that are console exclusive to MS will be on PCs.
Different featuresets, SDKs between Sony and MS systems are bigger points of pain than some reduction in GPU and ram amount between Lockhart and Xsx.

 

[dobwal]

Wont there being a PS5 that has lower specs automatically hold back the Xbox series x ? The only major change to the rumored LH is that it has lower gpu power but at the same time its not targeting the same resolution.

Do consoles last 7+ years ? Ps4 lasted what 3 years ? xbox one 4 ?

Of course they do. The X and Pro didn’t inhibit support for the base consoles.

 

[dobwal]

For the sake of argument, what if the CPU is clocked lower and that limits the in game physics as a result? Or the RAM is less and they limit some world quality thing? That an XSBX only title would be 24 racers but it ends up being 16 cars as that's as many as LH can support?

However, I'm not debating that! With no idea what the HW differences are, we can't even guess at if it'll be impactful or not. I'm just saying it's a different situation to other devices where people don't complain.

I doubt that will happen. You literally are creating a tangible different experience between hardware of the same gen and platform.

Resolution, FPS and texture quality. Yes.

Actual difference that impact gameplay. Probably not.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

I doubt that will happen. You literally are creating a tangible different experience between hardware of the same gen and platform.

Resolution, FPS and texture quality. Yes.

Actual difference that impact gameplay. Probably not.

I would argue that gameplay would actually be impacted. You can gain graphics performance by lower resolution, fps and texture quality sure but gameplay i.e. physics, AI etc. would have an impact if say the CPU is clocked lower and there is less memory bandwidth to run at example 1440p 60fps which is what I have been hearing MS is targeting for LH. Remember LH is supposed to replace/perform like the XBox One X, or at least that was the impression I got of the rumoured LH leaks.

 

[AlNom]

For the sake of argument, what if the CPU is clocked lower and that limits the in game physics as a result? Or the RAM is less and they limit some world quality thing? That an XSBX only title would be 24 racers but it ends up being 16 cars as that's as many as LH can support?

However, I'm not debating that! With no idea what the HW differences are, we can't even guess at if it'll be impactful or not. I'm just saying it's a different situation to other devices where people don't complain.

I suspect that since developers already have to deal with CPU performance differences between platforms as well as API performance differences, they'll design around a general target, and framerate will simply suffer on the lower clocked SKU when being pushed to the limit of the framerate target rather than having a comfortable overhead that some developers adhere to i.e. higher end SKU simply fixes the framerate, which I don't see why anyone would complain about unless the very idea of "pushing consoles" just means cinematic bullshit framerates. Even in the absence of the current midgen twins, framerate could suffer on base consoles already that was somewhat rectified only after the midgen twins appeared.

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RAM would be a concern certainly - how much work might there be to cut things down beyond texture resolution when MS is already talking about smarter ways of accessing textures and optimizing streaming buffer sizes with faster storage access? Framebuffers will be 1/3 to 1/4 in size in practice, so that can shave off maybe a GB or so of the various buffers in the post-process chain. RT BVH structures will scale to ^3, so that's another area (volume *cough*) to scale down. Below a certain resolution of RT, it might just be better to roll a simpler fallback solution anyway (which PC devs may consider anyway).

idk. :|

 

[Scott_Arm]

@Unknown Soldier It won't perform like Xbox One. Even if the CPU is clocked a bit lower than Series X, it'll still be a massive increase over Jaguar. On top of that you get the full feature set of RDNA2 like VRS and mesh shaders and the same nvme drive as Series X. The biggest downside I see is if it only has 12GB of RAM instead of 16GB. I don't think RAM consumption will scale. I think it'll be hard to free up 4GB of RAM without compromising more than texture resolution.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

@Unknown Soldier It won't perform like Xbox One. Even if the CPU is clocked a bit lower than Series X, it'll still be a massive increase over Jaguar. On top of that you get the full feature set of RDNA2 like VRS and mesh shaders and the same nvme drive as Series X. The biggest downside I see is if it only has 12GB of RAM instead of 16GB. I don't think RAM consumption will scale. I think it'll be hard to free up 4GB of RAM without compromising more than texture resolution.

Yes sorry, I should have been clear and pointed that the GPU is supposed to be like the 6TF Xbox One X(henceforth called the XBOX) i.e. 1440p 60fps gaming. I mentioned in this thread yesterday or the day before that the rumours I heard was that it was a 4TF RDNA2 GPU that performed around the same or better than the 6TF GCN GPU unit in the XBOX hence being it's direct replacement. That was the impression I got on the leak.

The CPU will of course be a huge advantage over the jaguar cores on the XBOX.

 

[AzBat]

Even without Lockhart, XBSX only titles are probably not going to happen.

Don't you mean XBSX 1st-party only titles in the first year after launch?

We already have 3rd party XBSX console exclusive titles(Scorn & Medium). Yes, I know they're coming to PC but we're talking consoles here.

Tommy McClain

 

[Proelite]

Don't you mean XBSX 1st-party only titles in the first year after launch?

We already have 3rd party XBSX console exclusive titles(Scorn & Medium). Yes, I know they're coming to PC but we're talking consoles here.

Tommy McClain

I meant XBSX exclusives. no PC no PS5. Just one console.

 

[HBRU]

If they come also to PC I would not call them XSX console exclusives... [emoji28]

The same CPU, an adeguate Bandwidth will make this LH an 1440@60 fps machine for many games... and that is going really good. As Sony's fan I'm concerned. MS has not problem to sell less XSX (with maybe 100 dollar loss) and more XSS (with maybe 50 dollar loss)... the goal is to sell game pass subscrptions and games.