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

[Jay]

Are the rumored specs confirmed BTW? 4 TFLOPs GPU and 10GB RAM?

All I saw so far was 512GB SSD and the generic RDNA2 + HDMI 2.1 features.

Memory, gpu, cpu not confirmed

I wouldn't dismiss it as generic RDNA2 features, as it's the features that their marketing for the XSX. Which means feature parity (even though we all knew it was same as xsx anyway) i remember seeing a breakdown that seemed to imply xsx gpu to be different to xss .

Auch, that price-per-GB already starts at over twice the price of what we'd get with an add-in NVMe SSD with similar performance.
Does this mean the 512GB in the XSS aren't expandable?

i personally dismiss this type of leaks.
This idea it doesn't have the expandable cartridge slot because we haven't seen the ports yet seem to be the most negative take from it I can think of.

We know they like you to be able to move your external usb storage around, no reason to think this would be different. (yet)

 

[Picao84]

For being precise I don't think this part of the comment is ok but the other part are true. Raytracing is dependent of resolution and in geometry complexity.

EDIT:
This is how they do raytracing on GT7, they raytrace at 768p and checkerboard the reflection at 1080p and they can have raytraced reflection at native 4k 60 fps.

Less pixel is equal to cheaper raytracing.

Interesting.
At what point does it stop making sense to do ray tracing if the resolution is dropped too much? Is there any point where it could look just odd and out of place? Or can they just use the calculations and extrapolate the results to higher resolutions without any impact?

 

[chris1515]

At what point does it stop making sense to do ray tracing if the resolution is dropped too much? Is there any point where it could look just odd and out of place? Or can they just use the calculations and extrapolate the results to higher resolutions without any impact?

Like on GT7 they can do it at lower resolution if it begins to not look good, people paid only 299 dollars for a 4 Tflops console. This is it. You know you will buy a lower quality console.

This is a level entry next generation console exactly what Microsoft told. And this is enough for people who will buy it. I suppose it will be an ok console at the beginning of the gen but it will suffer in second part of the gen.

 

[Picao84]

Like on GT7 they can do it at lower resolution if it begins to not look good, people paid only 299 dollars for a 4 Tflops console. This is it. You know you will buy a lower quality console.

This is a level entry next generation console exactly what Microsoft told.

So effectively, the XBSS might end up with very little difference graphically, apart from frame times, from an XBox One X. The experience might be different with better AI and Physics, for example, due to better CPU, but graphically wise the jump is likely to not be nearly as impressive as some people are saying. Regardless, with a 249 price point, at least in the UK, it does make sense and it might sell well.

 

[PSman1700]

So effectively, the XBSS might end up with very little difference graphically, apart from frame times, from an XBox One X. The experience might be different with better AI and Physics, for example, due to better CPU, but graphically wise the jump is likely to not be nearly as impressive as some people are saying. Regardless, with a 249 price point, at least in the UK, it does make sense and it might sell well.

How do you come to that conclusion? I was abit sceptical before with the whole XSS project. But it makes more sense to me now then before, seeing upscaling tech like DLSS (and amd alternative?) a lower TF gpu can be easily resolved with rendering much lower and scale up to whatever resolution they want to, even 4k?

A 3.8ghz zen2 cpu (faster then PS5), fast GDDR6 ram, advanced RDNA2 gpu with ray tracing, 3d audio hardware and fast NVME SSD tech. How that can't be more then a slight difference to the jaguar armed One x with it's aging gpu tech together with HDD and everything else from the stone age is beyond me.
In terms of hardware, the XSS at 4TF is in a total another universe. Besides that, we have no idea about the technical specs, the GPU could be a 6 or even 8TF part, who knows. They could have reduced the amount of CU's while keeping the clock at the same level or higher.
If the NVME is at 512GB instead of 1TB, they save alot there. Then no disc drive and a reduced amount of gddr6 ram due to lower resolutions.

That thing at 299 seems a very good deal, in special if it basically plays everything except XSX exclusives like fable, hb2 etc. But that's exclusives, which usually amount for about 10% of the install base.
Anyway, awaiting the official specs, going to be intresting, a new approach to console generations.

Edit: the 512gb nvme might be low, it's 300gb less then the PS5. But with fast internet spreading and available to more then last gen, its less of a problem then before atleast. Expandable storage is almost a need anyway with 800gb to 1TB as max for a 2020 product. Consoles storage sizes didnt really grow. My 8TB pc already fills rather quick if i want to install all steam games.

Also, probably not but, what if they come with variable clocks too for the lower end SKU? Say between 6 and 8TF, they can't have 4TF fixed but variable clock tech could net 8TF max boost. They can just announce 8TF 'most of the time', 'don't stress things', and we have a 8TF console at 299.

 

[BRiT]

External expansion moved to its own topic since its for Series X as well: https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/xbox-series-x-s-external-expansion-discussion-spawn.61990/

 

[BRiT]

Let me apologize for not catching the earlier comment in my state of no sleep and dealing with it when it occurred. Thank you to the forum posters who reacted properly by actually reporting the post and resisted contributing further to the problem by reacting in the thread.

Should such an issue happen again, use the Report post function so all moderators are made aware of the issue.

 

[milk]

Since rays are, in the current implementation, kicked off from the camera view point (rather than actual sources, effectively inverting the natural direction of light, unless we are Cyclops haha), as it is the cheaper method of doing it, resolution does have an impact.

Correct. In fact that's how ray tracing is done most of the time, from the early old school renders up to modern unbiased path tracers.

It may seem counter intuitive to trace rays backwards, but it makes sense since you are only interested in the light rays that eventually end up hitting the camera, which are a miniscule minority of all potential rays.

Even though they backtrack the direction of light, if they do their math right, it will still be completely phisically correct. The line of thought is "for whatever light ray got to this camera pixel, it must have come from this surface, what light sources got to this surface?" rather than "here is my light, lets shoot millions of rays out of it and see which ones end up bouncing into the camera if any at all"

When ray tracing is used to shoot rays from the lightsource it is called photon mapping, and while it is also a rich field of research, it rarely is used for production cgi since it is just way less efficient while not necessarely being more phisically correct. The one phenomena it can sometimes result in faster convergence to ground truth is complex caustics, which has motivated some modern path tracers to become bi-directional, meaning the shoot rays in both directions.

Even then, it's important to realize the photon-mapping rays are not completely view independent. A big aspect of photon mapping research is improving the way how they can avoid shooting rays into directions that don't end up contributing to the final render at all, and "guiding" rays into places that the camera pixels actually do care about. All that without breaking phisical correcness or biasing the results, of course.

 

[chris1515]

How do you come to that conclusion? I was abit sceptical before with the whole XSS project. But it makes more sense to me now then before, seeing upscaling tech like DLSS (and amd alternative?) a lower TF gpu can be easily resolved with rendering much lower and scale up to whatever resolution they want to, even 4k?

A 3.8ghz zen2 cpu (faster then PS5), fast GDDR6 ram, advanced RDNA2 gpu with ray tracing, 3d audio hardware and fast NVME SSD tech. How that can't be more then a slight difference to the jaguar armed One x with it's aging gpu tech together with HDD and everything else from the stone age is beyond me.
In terms of hardware, the XSS at 4TF is in a total another universe. Besides that, we have no idea about the technical specs, the GPU could be a 6 or even 8TF part, who knows. They could have reduced the amount of CU's while keeping the clock at the same level or higher.
If the NVME is at 512GB instead of 1TB, they save alot there. Then no disc drive and a reduced amount of gddr6 ram due to lower resolutions.

That thing at 299 seems a very good deal, in special if it basically plays everything except XSX exclusives like fable, hb2 etc. But that's exclusives, which usually amount for about 10% of the install base.
Anyway, awaiting the official specs, going to be intresting, a new approach to console generations.

Edit: the 512gb nvme might be low, it's 300gb less then the PS5. But with fast internet spreading and available to more then last gen, its less of a problem then before atleast. Expandable storage is almost a need anyway with 800gb to 1TB as max for a 2020 product. Consoles storage sizes didnt really grow. My 8TB pc already fills rather quick if i want to install all steam games.

Also, probably not but, what if they come with variable clocks too for the lower end SKU? Say between 6 and 8TF, they can't have 4TF fixed but variable clock tech could net 8TF max boost. They can just announce 8TF 'most of the time', 'don't stress things', and we have a 8TF console at 299.

Again the zen2 CPU is 3.6 Ghz with SMT and for example Dirt 5 devs told they use SMT because it is faster. The CPU is use in I/O more on Xbox Series X and S than PS5. This is probably a wash in real world performance.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/h0vr88

I think Xbox Series S will suffer in performance for the second part of the gen when they will begin to push the consoles further near their limit.

Globally and the number was given a few years ago by Quantic Dreams a games is played by two times more player than the sales because of used games. A game like UC4 or TLOU have between 35 millions and 40 millions player. An exclusive games on PS4 is probably played by between 1/5 to 1/3 of the installed base.

https://gamstat.com/

You can find some number here but like Steamspy this is often not accurate and they show less player than the reality.

 

[Jay]

That thing at 299 seems a very good deal, in special if it basically plays everything except XSX exclusives like fable, hb2 etc. But that's exclusives, which usually amount for about 10% of the install base.

There won't be XSX exclusives next gen, XSS and XSX will play the same games, from BC to next gen only.

 

[chris1515]

Sea of thieves on Xbox side was played by 30% of the Xbox installed base.

EDIT: I am sure if we do a top 20 of the biggest sales for Ps4 games with multiplatform release counting only PS4 versions, we will find multiple PS4 exslusives title like Spiderman, TLOU2, Uncharted 4, God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, probably Ghost of Tsushima too.

And Same Sea of Thieves is probably in the top 20 of the most played games on Xbox.

Exclusives matters.

EDIT2: Forget Sea of Thieves was on PC too.

 

[PSman1700]

Again the zen2 CPU is 3.6 Ghz with SMT and for example Dirt 5 devs told they use SMT because it is faster. The CPU is use in I/O more on Xbox Series X and S than PS5. This is probably a wash in real world performance.

Depends, single core performance still matters for some uses. Also, it's not a wash, that's assuming the CPU never deviates from it's 3.5ghz max clock in the PS5. 200/300mhz below that can and probably will happen as devs opt for more GPU power.

I think Xbox Series S will suffer in performance for the second part of the gen when they will begin to push the consoles further near their limit.

I think they will scale it accordingly. Resolution is a resource hog still.

Globally and the number was given a few years ago by Quantic Dreams a games is played by two times more player than the sales because of used games. A game like UC4 or TLOU have between 35 millions and 40 millions player. An exclusive games on PS4 is probably played by between 1/5 to 1/3 of the installed base.

Yes, im talking about market share, how much copies are sold. Not how many play it as it doesnt add much revenue to Sony etc.

There won't be XSX exclusives next gen, XSS and XSX will play the same games, from BC to next gen only.

So the MS chart stating XSX exclusive was false? Thought it was from MS itself.

Exclusives matters.

Never said they didn't, but if they sell 10% of the install base in numbers, they don't matter as much as titles like CoD, GTA, RDR etc.

 

[iroboto]

So effectively, the XBSS might end up with very little difference graphically, apart from frame times, from an XBox One X. The experience might be different with better AI and Physics, for example, due to better CPU, but graphically wise the jump is likely to not be nearly as impressive as some people are saying. Regardless, with a 249 price point, at least in the UK, it does make sense and it might sell well.

On the RT side of things; we can perform RT in software, and typically we still do forms of raycasting today anyway and it’s still expensive to do. The goals of hybrid ray tracing is to mix different techniques together to gather a complete picture. So It may make sense to do SSR and at other times use SVOGI, and others doing some form of video GI and just using ray tracing to clean up edge cases or light bleeding through walls.

there are a variety of ways it can be used so having that acceleration is still important. But it’s going to be the difference between low quality and higher quality RT. Ie how much and the quality of fidelity.

as for other items; Xbox is feature level 12.0. It’s lacks a great deal of features that the 12.2 GPUs have. These features would enable new methods to render at greater performance.

X1X would not be comparable to XSS optimized title.

there will still be a jump in graphics. Though this particular language should be Reserved for post launch wave 2/3 games. As I get the feeling it will be some time for engines to change to accommodate all the new toys they get in next generation.

RT is just one of them. A big one; but one of many.

 

[goonergaz]

Never said they didn't, but if they sell 10% of the install base in numbers, they don't matter as much as titles like CoD, GTA, RDR etc.

Problem is your maths are all off, exclusives are something than makes your box unique - believe it or not exclusives are far more important than performance.

 

[AzBat]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1303687722205196290

There you go. Microsoft did a teardown for a rumored console before Sony. LOL

Tommy McClain

 

[Jay]

So the MS chart stating XSX exclusive was false? Thought it was from MS itself.

Not false, true at the time because there was only the xsx.
Moving forward expect it to change, at most it might say optimized for xsx.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1303687722205196290

There you go. Microsoft did a teardown for a rumored console before Sony. LOL

Tommy McClain

i mentioned in other thread, but you can see the space for the external storage cartridge on the board

 

[Picao84]

How do you come to that conclusion? I was abit sceptical before with the whole XSS project. But it makes more sense to me now then before, seeing upscaling tech like DLSS (and amd alternative?) a lower TF gpu can be easily resolved with rendering much lower and scale up to whatever resolution they want to, even 4k?

A 3.8ghz zen2 cpu (faster then PS5), fast GDDR6 ram, advanced RDNA2 gpu with ray tracing, 3d audio hardware and fast NVME SSD tech. How that can't be more then a slight difference to the jaguar armed One x with it's aging gpu tech together with HDD and everything else from the stone age is beyond me.
In terms of hardware, the XSS at 4TF is in a total another universe. Besides that, we have no idea about the technical specs, the GPU could be a 6 or even 8TF part, who knows. They could have reduced the amount of CU's while keeping the clock at the same level or higher.
If the NVME is at 512GB instead of 1TB, they save alot there. Then no disc drive and a reduced amount of gddr6 ram due to lower resolutions.

That thing at 299 seems a very good deal, in special if it basically plays everything except XSX exclusives like fable, hb2 etc. But that's exclusives, which usually amount for about 10% of the install base.
Anyway, awaiting the official specs, going to be intresting, a new approach to console generations.

Edit: the 512gb nvme might be low, it's 300gb less then the PS5. But with fast internet spreading and available to more then last gen, its less of a problem then before atleast. Expandable storage is almost a need anyway with 800gb to 1TB as max for a 2020 product. Consoles storage sizes didnt really grow. My 8TB pc already fills rather quick if i want to install all steam games.

Also, probably not but, what if they come with variable clocks too for the lower end SKU? Say between 6 and 8TF, they can't have 4TF fixed but variable clock tech could net 8TF max boost. They can just announce 8TF 'most of the time', 'don't stress things', and we have a 8TF console at 299.

It doesn't make sense for them to make LH have dynamic clocks while Anaconda does not. It would just increase the work Devs have to do already to support two tier consoles.
Regarding the specs, arguably the biggest update is the CPU, at least in the beginning, as I'm not expecting third party Devs to take full advantage of the SSD as of yet, other than load times. In pure graphical terms that helps with faster frame rates and maybe better physics as I mentioned. Anything else graphically wise that we can expect from the CPU upgrade? DLSS is interesting but is a Nvidia tech that makes use of tensor cores and we don't know if RDNA2 has something similar yet. Microsoft did mention special hardware for machine learning in Series X, but it's not confirmed that's part of LH as well. Finally, if DLSS or something analogous was part of LH, why is Microsoft promoting this as a 1080/1440p machine then? They could as well sell it as 4K machine and even Anaconda as 8K!

 

[Strange]

So the MS chart stating XSX exclusive was false? Thought it was from MS itself.

Are you suggesting that there will be games for Xbox SX but not Xbox SS?

That would be moronic.

Also, they would state that simply because they refused to admit the SS existed until a few days ago so of course it wouldn't be stated as supported.

 

[cheapchips]

What's going on with the S's memory chips? There's only 4. There's nothing on the back. Thought they only went up to 2Gb (and that 1GB was cheaper)

 

[Deleted member 13524]

What's going on with the S's memory chips? There's only 4. There's nothing on the back. Thought they only went up to 2Gb (and that 1GB was cheaper)

View attachment 4566

Four memory chips, so we're looking at 128bit GDDR6?

CPU 3.6GHz SMT Off / 3.4GHz SMT On
GPU: at 6m29s - "The Xbox Series S is more than 4x as powerful as the Xbox One S". So with RDNA >> GCN IPC, I guess 4TFLOPs is pretty much confirmed.
10GB GDDR6, 224GB/s. -> looks like 128bit GDDR6, probably 3x 16Gb chips and 1x 32Gb chip, meaning 8 GB get the full 224GB/s bandwidth whereas the last 2GB get 56GB/s.



They keep claiming the Series S is a console that runs SeriesX games at 1440p instead of native 4K.
It does seem there will be some pressure on devs to put all games running at native 4K on the SeriesX..