1st question: What do you think MS could have packed in the box for an extra $100, with the goal of having the box still be no bigger than the PS5 if possible?
2nd question: If this extra hardware meant that all these 30 fps UE5 games coming soon were 60 fps instead or the 60 fps ones had full RT as well, would consumers care enough that MS might have gained lots of market share from this move?
1. Slightly more memory, and enough to give a "flat memory space" ie. such that it is all accessed at the same high speed.
maybe the XSX gets 20Gb total, ans the XSS gets 16?
Perhaps also a slight increase on the SSD, maybe so it has 1TB and 512Gb usable space, instead of 1 /512 total.
Given the constraints of the boxes i doubt they could have gone for much with higher CPU/GPU power.
MAYBE? and thats a big maybe is another 4 CU's? either by going for perfect dies, or having a 60CU die, and using 56?
2. Nope. at the time the hardware was shipped, 2x the RT performance was miles off - especially on an AMD architecture.
Doubling the RT perf of the XSX with that generation of hardware requires basically 2x - or more hardware, cis some of the RT stuff is still CPU dependent.
The console market is tricky you want games to run best on your hardware, but if your hardware is too far advanced then devs just get it too good enough and dont spend the extra effort to get 10% more on a platform where it runs fine on 60fps already.
Honestly imho, and hindsight the best here, MS would have been best use of the theoretical $100M to create a second ATG ( Advanced Technology Group )
and send the ATG round to studio to help add polish and performance to their games.
They already have the more powerful hardware, but the software doesn't always show that.
they need to create an attitude of "games look better on xbox" amongst consumers.
that trickles down from serious gamers to the general population, and sells boxes and games.