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

The sad part is all the 4k TVs that are really too far away / small to be any different than a 1080p display. That's where the 1440p 'performance target' / '4k upscaling' help in the marketing blurb.

 

Welcome to the boot.

 

Excited for this little gem. All for $25 a month with GPU!

 

how it effects games, it shouldn't be noticeable for the most part, still it is a much better cpu on both consoles. The Jaguar from the current generation had less than half the IPC compared to a 3700X at 2.1GHz

 

This is going to be the perfect gamepass (and BC) machine. I think this is going to be a very successful machine for MS overall. Devs are forced to optimize for it because customers will buy it in masse, so MS will have every multiplat games already optimized to run on cheap xCloud servers. It's win win for MS. It's win for customers. It's also another platform to develop for so more work for developers and a new baseline for next gen: 7.5GB (or 8GB?) of available ram.

 

Interesting idea on cheap Xcloud. We saw the CPU was slightly lower than the series X. I wondered if that was overhead for something on the X. Perhaps it is the cloud overhead allowance to make the chips more scalable across devices. The Xcloud uses custom APU and that I assume is going to change as this was designed from the outset with the data center in mind.

From Eurogamer

Based on my discussions with Microsoft at the recent X019, there are a couple of interesting facts here: first of all, the Xbox One S silicon is set to output at 120Hz, lowering latency by ensuring that new frames reach the encoder as soon as possible (the onboard encoder in the Xbox One S processor used for game capture isn't active for xCloud service). Secondly, the CPU component of the processor runs at a higher clock than standard retail units, in order to accommodate the extra demands put on the chip by the encoding pipeline.

 

I'll just throw in a thought question. How you would read the entire 10GB of data once and maxing the bandwidth at 224GB/s the entire way.

 

1440p to 4K also looks way better than 1080p to 4K for games that doesnt do temporal reconstruction

 

Agree, it is helpful target if games are meeting it. I need something more empirical than my feelings on this but...My feeling is that shimmer free AA (however you get there) on a 1080p image is alway a softer look than say a 1080p blu ray. The latter really isn't going to look that soft on many people's 4k setups. Improved AA next gen, however it's done, hopefully removes the same level of temporal noise with better sharpness.

 

Perfect BC how? It probably (most definitely) won't run OneX ports.

Kind of getting ahead of ourselves here.

 

If I understand what you are asking, how can you saturate a 224 GB/s pathway if you RAM is only 10GB? That's easy. You aren't reading the entirety of you RAM every frame, lots of data is sort of just there being used as needed. The main part of 3d rendering, at least when it comes to bandwidth isn't about what you've got stored in ram, it's writing and reading render targets. And that bus isn't 100% efficient. And the bandwidth usage scales linearly with resolution and framerate. IIRC a 1080p framebuffer at 32bit color and 32bit Zbuffer require the GPU to write about half a gig a second at 60fps. HDR, higher resolutions, and higher framerates are all going to multiply this. And that doesn't account for games that do funky things like rendering Z only before rerendering the scene, or full resolution render to texture, or whatever the requirements of raytracing are. And this all in contention with reading textures and other game assets, and on console there is contention with what the CPU is doing. And all of this talk this generation about loading assets from SSD just in time is going to play a role here, too.

Random fact, the Xbox 360's eDRAM was only 10MB and it has 256 GB/s bandwidth, and it was exclusive to the GPU. More than 1000 times smaller and it still had more bandwidth.

 

I´m shure of it... I know the console is quite capable. Question is how will 224 GB/s handle the 320 GB/s of the Xbox One X? Was that bandwidth not used?

 

not used for making prettier pixels. Driving a resolution 4x the amount of XBO. Those 4K textures need to get moving fast. Filling the memory up with a larger buffer zone because of slow HDD.

 

So a heads up in the UK, you can currently (I suspect for not much longer!) get £220 trade in on the X, so just £30 to 'upgrade'.

Bonus; if you include the points you earn for trade in and purchase that makes it near just £25

Double bonus; if you have the elite reward card the points you earn mean it'll essentially cost you £15

edit - at Game, what an idiot, major info missing!

 

link shit.. I better start shopping around LOL

 

I doubt games max out memory bandwidth all the time, but lets assume these One X games are using the memory bandwidth to the fullest. Just how much many milliseconds of rendering time would this limited memory bandwidth cause? Does the GPU have more cache on the Series S compared to the One X, reducing the bandwidth requirements of the main memory? Same goes with the CPU, would the Series S be able to run all the One X code with lower bandwidth requirements because of improved L2 and L3 cache? I feel like the Series S newer architecture is going to complete its work faster than the One X doing the same work. So even if it does run into some stalls due to bandwidth limitations, if it is getting everything else done quicker, the frame time budget could still be met. Look at the Tegra X1 in the Switch, a meager 25GB/s bandwidth to the main memory, but it still managed to run a lot of 360/PS3 at twice the resolution, despite having less memory bandwidth. Yes, I know it has better memory compression and cache than those consoles, but Im thinking that applies to the Series S as well.

I dont see why less overall memory compared to the One X is a deal breaker. All games on One X also run on One S, which has less memory capacity than the Series S. With the far superior SSD drive, seems like streaming in content will be so much quicker than less memory capacity wont be a hurdle that developers struggle to overcome. No matter what, all these games will need to have some work done to support the new hardware. Series S looks positioned to run One X games at 1440p without it becoming a science project.

 

Link what?

Stuff about elite?

Trade in link?

 

The Trade in.

Thanks, damn. I need to keep on this if the TIV is good. I should TIV asap before those deals are gone.

 

Yeah, I can see it dropping pretty quick pretty soon TBH, I mean the XBOs is only £110 IIRC so not worth it

 

Thanks for the heads up.
Wonder if they'll sell the XSS.

I'm tempted to do it.