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

How about a family with multiple kids ? When i was a kid we had one intelivision and one nes . Luckly my older sister wasn't into games and the nes quickly went into my bed room when i got a 12 inch tv for my 7th birthday( my niece 31 years later got a 50 inch tv for the same birthday lol )

But i could easily see a family more willing to get two XSS than an XSX or PS5. If you think about it and the ps5 is $500 but Lockhart is $300 you can still walk away with 2 of them for $100 more than the ps5. If MS comes in at half the price of the ps5 then its an easier choice for the family.

Throw in a few months of Family game pass ultimate perhaps if such a thing was happening and maybe its an even smarter choice for a family.

 

More reasonable scenario is:

XB series S comes in 2nd half of 2021.

$249~$299

PS5 already releases for almost one year.

PS5 digital will have some promotion in holidays 2021. $349~$399.


This is what most likely happens.

 

Good luck running parity with Xbox one X with 2 less GB to work with.

 

Lockhart is targeting a lower resolution than 4K & the SSD should mean a reduction in streaming buffer size. It's not meant to be an upgrade path for Scorpio folks. It's rather putting its performance to higher quality shading per pixel than Scorpio targetting 2-4x output.

For the games that had performance modes on Scorpio @ 1080p, 4K textures would be less sensible to keep in memory given how MIP selection functions, but they could otherwise increase the size of streaming buffers. For this case, it shouldn't be as terrible to match considering the architecture (RDNA2/Zen2/SSD).


edit:

It's perhaps worth considering that render targets for a 1080p game can amount to several hundred MB. At 4K/Scorpio, that could be 1.5GB, so approximately 1GB savings already. Tweaking the texture memory to cover the rest may not be so egregious.

 

Presuming that Xbox Series S might have ray tracing disabled or lowered to be able to hit that 1440p target, I wonder how that could work with multiplayer titles? I mean imagine if in the next Battlefield some players could see approaching players by the reflection in a pane of glass while players on lower tier hardware wouldn't have reflections enabled, leaving them at a disadvantage.

Spoiler

First world problems.

 

How does it work today in BFV pc? I play it at ultra on a 2080Ti but i feel i dont have any advantage aside from slick graphics.

 

There's a pubg like pc game where if you lower the graphic, bushes are not rendered, so other players that think to be hiding under them are comically visible.
Maybe we think too much about it.

 

Wow, just wow.
We literally have the source say it's targeting 1440p 60fps, which is actually in the realm of what the Xbox One X is realistically doing, and here you are saying that the series S targets 1080p and thus losing the 2 gigs is fine. Love the way the goal posts are being shifted.


Anyway, devs now have to target 4 distinctly different hardware with varying amounts of memory (I'll count the Xbox 1 and Xbox 1S as the same).

Xbox One S 8G, 900P 30 fps
Xbox One X 12G 1440p~1800p 30fps
(these are taken from realistically doable sources)

Xbox Series S 10G 1440p 60fps
Xbox Series X 16G 2160p 60fps

Remember how Devs complain about developing for radically different consoles?

 

I'm sorry, I didn't see the source? I don't appreciate the accusation, so calm down.

The 1440p target is an interesting one considering the output of TVs. I'd be surprised if developers go through with that in the general case.

edit: okay, the Tom Warren thing above.

Okay, so that's roughly 1/2 the render load of 4K. So just adjust the extra 3-4GB texture pack on top of Durango (Scorpio's 9GB, including extra render target memory and texture resolution) to 1/2 (although textures would be adjusted 1/2 x 1/2, so you're back to square one). It's not exactly the most difficult of situations.

 

That same "source" says Series X is targetting 8K. So you need to be careful in reading what was actually presented.

 

The realities of the situation beyond what is technically possible is that Series X is targetting 4K displays and Lockhart is targetting 1080p displays.

 

Yeah, pretty lofty expectations, if a bit silly.

It'll be harder to scale the memory requirements from Anaconda to Lockhart than from Scorpio to Lockhart for example.

 

The last game i remember where you actually had advantages that matter where BF2 where you could play at low and have no shadows etc. Try to play BF3, BF4 or even Apex at lowest vs high, there's no advantages anymore compared to older MP pc games.

The lowering of settings to gain sizeable advantages don't exist today anymore in the pc space, aside from maybe some no-name low budget games that i dont know off.

Otherwise, advantages do exist ofcourse, even today on consoles, i can imagine that someone playing on a One s or PS4 versus someone on a One x playing at close to 4k with a smoother framerate and perhaps a better sound/tv setup. But those are a given, theres people on XIM also.... In the end its skills that matter the most.
Then theres people playing pubg and fortnite on phones against people with R9 3900x/2080Ti with kb/mouse stuff. All seemt o enjoy gaming anyway.

 

Except MS's own internal targets for was 1080p for Durango and 4K for Scorpio, so you'd have to apply the same "goalpost" consistently in the discussion.

Basically, it's fluff for reality as noted above.

 

Yes, if we follow Strange, XSX will have a basic target rendering resolution of 8k. Holy crap, not only are new consoles expensive, we now also need 8k television sets right of the bat.

 

Well, ultimately, the original discussion point was about scaling memory from 9GB down to 7.5GB memory space, which is really not that bad when considering the render targets (1/2 of Scorpio's 4K) & the corresponding texture requirements. Scaling on PC is pretty straightforward on there.

 

Scaling in general has improved alot these days. It's quite amazing, i mean we have the switch getting versions of doom and alot more. The more powerfull console versions didn't really suffer much there, they look up to par with the best out there, if not technically even more impressive. If anything, i think if you want to have multiple hardware targets, there wasn't a better way to start it then now.
Compare that to previous generations, how scaling worked between more powerfull and less powerfull hardware.

https://insidermedia.ign.com/insider/image/splintercell_040703_in2.jpg

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1Qsb7s_knsQ/maxresdefault.jpg

Tip of the iceberg, there's much more. SSX3 on ps2 had a rather terrible framerate and low resolution, whereas on xbox it was a smooth 60 and higher resolution.
Same with PC gaming back then, if anyone remembers, was more of a mess then today.
Throw in tech like AI and DLSS, and more indifferent hardware configurations between consoles. Scaling has gotten better then ever atleast.

Ofcourse theres advantages to having just one configuration to work with, but that only applies to exclusives, which, believe it or not, are going to appear on XSX-only too. One of the advantages buying the XSX was XSX-exclusive games believing that image someone shared a short while ago.
Highly doubt that hellblade 2, fable, forza etc are goig to scale all the way down to the One S, but perhaps to the lockhart at a lower resolution, which seems plausible since its RAM and GPU that have lowered specs, which do scale with resolution and ram usage (and bandwith).

The reason Halo Infinite didn't look like a next gen game is probably due to the fact also that it's a MP/apex style oriented game where 60 and even 120fps matter. You cant ever expect 30fps style true next gen AAA graphics for such a title.
But better perhaps then what was shown, it was kind of a mess in some ways, hence the huge delay.

 

I'm curious to see how games are bundled at the backend. I assume Microsoft are adopting an Apple iOS-type module bundling system where the game downloads code and graphics dependant on the remote platform. That said, maybe there isn't a lot of space saved reducing graphical assets for 1440p output vs 4K. So many questions! Well, ok, one question. But I'm still curious!

I guess we'll have to wait for some back-side box art showing install sizes of games.

 

Yes, it's called Smart Delivery. It's been a thing since Xbox One X. Bundled systems are coming with games pre-loaded on hard drive. No download necessary.

Tommy McClain