Xbox Series S [XBSS] (Lockhart) General Rumors and Speculation *spawn*
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rokkerkory
Regular
It's cute, I like it... if it's under $300 then winner.
cheapchips
Veteran
I'd have thought no UHD. Gives more room for the PSU and gives it more air. And physical media is moronic landfill in this day and age.
Also, is there really room for the SSD on the back of that main board? If it's on a daughterboard, then you have to provide PCI4.0 lanes back to the APU. Wonder at the cost balance of that vs a bigger main board and case.
A taller case would be a shame though. The gaming God's surely demand a resurgence in compact cuboid consoles.
I agree, but why would there be no VRS or Mesh shading ?Puts on politician aura:
Games that are console exclusives will need to target two different consoles with different featureset, APIs, and performance in the PS5 and Xsx. I would argue if the feature-set is wildly different, then next gen will be held back by both consoles, as the common denominator would be the intersection of the two.
I.e a game optimized for a baseline of 36 CUs, 1825mhz, no VRS, no SFS, no Tempest, no mesh shading, 4.8GB/s SSD and middling RT.
I personally see no reason why there wouldn't be mesh shading and some form of VRS.
The only thing I'd say is, if that PS dev is to be believed what he says reads like it doesn't but don't worry got other stuff.
I still believe it has it personally until officially/properly told otherwise.
I think people expecting xss to be less than $300 is wrong. I hope so anyway as to get to that price point the cuts would be too drastic.
I think even hitting $350 is tough but required.
Bellow $300 can be covered by XO, until xss gets couple price cuts.
Based on what the BOM of the XBSX might be, it's difficult to remove $200 of parts, but not impossible:
Main SoC -50
No ODD -18
512GB SSD -50
12GB ram -25
smaller psu/fan and no cast alu frame -30
That's $173 below XBSX, not bad if we add an additional $27 loss on the S versus the X, considering it's a door stop without buying games digitally, no used games, no borrowing. And nobody will buy it as a cheap UHD player either. It would be a services centric box, for those into that sort of thing. Razor and blades model and all that.
512GB is a really bad capacity considering it will be at least 150GB reserved for OS and apps and suspend area. But... proprietary storage means the razor and blades model again justifying a bigger loss on the console.
Why not XCube?
Might be possible considering that, but how do you sell a "digital centric" machine with 512Gb of storage only ? A bit dauntless
You could maybe get away with supporting external storage and swapping games over. I think the primary concern is whether there's actually a market for a download-only $300 console. This move would see MS commit to it without much evidence it's a viable platform AFAICS, which is very different to and far more expensive than supporting a download-only box by simply striping out the OD from the ordinary console. Going from MrFox's numbers, I'd be more inclined to play it safe, keep the OD, and offset any losses by the assumption that people will buy enough games and services to make it profitable. $300 isn't a bottom-price device for the sort of market that'll only buy used games. It's a decent price for 1080p gamers who want next-gen but not at a $500 pricepoint.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
And yet many of the best showcases for the current generation are cross platform games that run on PC machines lower spec'd than the XBO.
RDR2 and COD: MW (2019), for example. And then you have cross platform games that not only scale further down but scale much farther up with features that don't yet exist on console like Control.
I think it's naïve to think that Lockhart would hold back developers being able to push the XBSX in any meaningful way assuming it isn't saddled with something like Jaguar CPU cores.
I could certainly see Lockhart not doing some of the things that the XBSX version does, certainly. Just like Control has RT on PCs with RT, but no RT on consoles or PCs without RT hardware.
Of course, this doesn't discount that there may be some developers who don't want to bother with doing that. Not every developer is as competent as Rockstar or Remedy or Infinity Ward or Capcom or any developer that does their own PC ports or are as talented as indie developers (who deal with this issue for every title they make), I guess.
But then these are likely developers that have another studio do the port to PC. So, they could always just hire another studio to do the relatively trivial (IMO) task of making it run on Lockhart. It's not like trying to make something work on the XBO with its reliance on ESRAM that no other platform has to deal with.
Regards,
SB
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You don't need to remove $200 worth of components if you change the method of purchase: Xbox All Access.
Tommy McClain
Tommy McClain
I would make the SSD about 650-750GB, it would end up being able to store almost the same amount as the xsx maybe 1 or 2 games less.
I believe $300 is the sweet spot if ps5 and xsx is $500, but $350 isn't bad and workable.
MS/xbox is a very much a data driven company, sometimes to their detriment as they don't always interpret it correctly. So I'm sure they have data supporting releasing xss.
And this time luck also swung their way with economy (obviously you lot know what I mean by luck, it's obviously not a good thing)
Silent_Buddha
Legend
With the intelligent delivery system combined with Lockhart targeting a lower resolution, they could likely even get away with a 500 GB SSD in addition to less memory as the install package wouldn't need to have all the high resolution textures of the XBSX. I could easily see the install package for a Lockhart based machine being 1/2 the size of the install package for the XBSX. The game on Lockhart doesn't necessarily need to WOW people like the game on XBSX, so the quality of things can be reduced much farther than just a naïve downscaling to 1440p or 1080p.
An optical drive may or may not be something you needed to keep as well. Although if this were meant for developing countries then an optical drive would be seen as more essential.
Oddly enough in that respect, Covid-19 may benefit a console without an optical drive as many people may be diving into digital downloads for the first time due to lockdown. And if their experience isn't bad, would be more inclined to potentially continue buying digital after lockdowns have been lifted.
Regards,
SB
If it's $200 cheaper then Series X then it might be $250 - $200 pricetag, which would easily sell.
cheapchips
Veteran
Xcloud streaming of your library would also mitigate a smaller storage size, especially if Lockhart is a '1080p' box.
Of course, but as we don't know whether Lockhart has an ODD or not, we can only speculate to that, and for my part, without access to Data, I think it's likely download only isn't popular and MS won't go that route. If Lockhart proves to be download only, it shows my assumption was wrong.
BTW - I don't understand the idea of a Series S. Surely Series X is the family, and you'll have member of that family being names Series X something? If Series X is a single console with no relatives, how is it a series?
Hmmm... I was taking that into account.
I don't think the game sizes would be as big as half the size of xsx. It's only a chunk of higher res textures, still need all the other textures, audio, engine, assets etc.
I think you would want to be able to store min 4 xss games.
Remember the whole ssd size isn't usable.
The next gen is just called xbox.
And you have different series within it.
So a series X
And a series S
Besides that it's a non starter to sell a machine with .5 TB SSD in, saving $50 on it is laughable too. MS isn't paying retail...
Judging by retail, a spanking fast 1TB NVME PCIE 4.0 SSD runs at bare minimum $140, so I dont expect MS's card solution to be less than $170 (proprietary tax) if we're lucky. So at that point You're making a near $200 accessory basically a must buy for your "cheap" console. Lockhart is just a bad idea.
I expect Lockhart may be canceled or in limbo within MS, and MSRP calculations just like this are probably a big reason why. Wouldn't even shock me if MS is dumb enough to push it out at only a $100 delta anyway (IE Seris X 499, Series S 399) and think that's a good idea.
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