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


The prime day sale was pretty good. $295 for the series s and the steel series arctis 3 wired headset. I think its all claimed but you can join the wait list.

The woot deal is better when its avalible at $250 for just the console

Think $250 is the sweet spot for this console. Hopefully we see that for the holiday.
 

The prime day sale was pretty good. $295 for the series s and the steel series arctis 3 wired headset. I think its all claimed but you can join the wait list.

The woot deal is better when its avalible at $250 for just the console

Think $250 is the sweet spot for this console. Hopefully we see that for the holiday.
The canadian deal was fairly decent.
Series S + 2TB external xbox drive for the 379 price point. (https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0B3LTC3PP/ref=twister_B08P8X6M72?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1)
Or a 50 dollar gift card and Series S for 364? (https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0B27HVH1B/ref=twister_B08P8X6M72?_encoding=UTF8&th=1)

It was enough to shoot XSS up to 41, XSX dropped back to 19 from 6 after Prime day.
 
oh those deals are pretty good then.

I am wondering if MS will have a full price cut in the fall or keep it at $300 and do promotional prices and then drop it for starfield in the spring
if Series supply is starting to be > demand, then yes, they'll start dropping the prices etc to equalize. Series S is probably getting close to a hard drive upgrade or a price drop. But likely I think the latter.
 
if Series supply is starting to be > demand, then yes, they'll start dropping the prices etc to equalize. Series S is probably getting close to a hard drive upgrade or a price drop. But likely I think the latter.

If supply starts to greatly outstrip demand then I could see both happening. A price reduction to get people that can't pull the trigger at the current MSRP for XBS-S as well as offering more storage for the current MSRP to lure in people that found 512 GB (less than that for game installs) too constraining for a digital only console combined with not being able or willing to buy an expansion drive.

BTW - this isn't particularly in response to your post but just in general for anyone reading this. Supply being slightly higher than demand is desirable as a manufacturer wants to ensure that there is always product on store shelves or available to purchase online. So, demand needs to drop significantly below supply before something like that triggers a response from the manufacturer to make their product more attractive. What constitutes "significant" depends on the manufacturer. Some are more or less willing to make changes to their product lineup and pricing. IE - if something is marketed at "premium" then any reduction in price would impact brand recognition negatively. Obviously XBS-S doesn't fall into that category, but just a generalized explanation of why products may or may not see adjustments if demand falls below supply.

Attempts to increase marketshare could also trigger something like that, but that also requires the manufacturer to believe that doing so will trigger enough purchases to warrant reducing the price since reducing the price or adding value without a commensurate increase in purchases would mean that the manufacturer just lost money for no gain. A second condition to this would be the manufacturer believing that they'll be able to supply enough product at the new price point to meet potential demand. Again, reducing the price or adding value to increase demand could lead to the manufacturer actually losing money if they can't supply enough product to meet demand.

Regards,
SB
 
Apparently, they've free'd up "hundreds of megabytes of memory". I've never met a dev who turned their nose up at more RAM, so this seems like a win. And even if you can get games to work in a smaller footprint, and you often can, not having to spend the time and effort trying to do that means you can spend it elsewhere.
 
It's also relative.
200MB more on XSS is worth lot more than on XSX, as the available memory is much smaller to begin with. So it's definitely good news.
Add to the fix to the graphics memory allocation performance bug and its all worthwhile updates.
 
It is worth to keep in mind that any extra memory must come from the slower 56GB/s memory pool.
 
It is worth to keep in mind that any extra memory must come from the slower 56GB/s memory pool.
I think this is a reasonable assumption, though this may not actually be true IIRC. I recall reading previous and older GDK documentation indicating at least on Series X, the whole 10GB of memory wasn't actually available for the GPU either, it was less, like 9.5GB. We assumed if there was going to be corner cutting, it would have been on the 2GB chips, taking from the slower pool. It just wasn't the case.
We're not sure why of course, but something of note.
 
I think this is a reasonable assumption, though this may not actually be true IIRC. I recall reading previous and older GDK documentation indicating at least on Series X, the whole 10GB of memory wasn't actually available for the GPU either, it was less, like 9.5GB. We assumed if there was going to be corner cutting, it would have been on the 2GB chips, taking from the slower pool. It just wasn't the case.
We're not sure why of course, but something of note.
Isn't the system reservation for the faster memory pool on both the XSX and XSS just 32MB?
 
Isn't the system reservation for the faster memory pool on both the XSX and XSS just 32MB?
That is how I understood it, going off the one set of leaked GDK release notes. There were also other statements (during a technical interview perhaps) saying on Series S the games don't use the slower memory segment as its entitely system or dashboard use. I don't have the link to this right now.

This "several hundred megs" might be an improvement in device drivers region where using certain features took up more game-level memory as that wouldn't technically be "system or dashboard reservation".
 
It also doesn't really matter to much whether it's out of the slow or faster pool.
I'm sure that things that could have been put into slow pool are currently in fast due to such a small slow pool anyway.

So move stuff from fast to slow and free up fast pool.
Either way, it's more memory so all good.
 
I wonder whether it will affect xss UX. In good or bad ways.

Currently the UX animations are rendered in 1080p (or 720p?) rather than 4k. So for example, when you press a button to show a pop-up menu, it will have blocky look when in animation. Then it snaps to sharp after the animation ends.

Some games also runs at half frame rate when the left sidebar is open.
 
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