I thought this was an interesting read. Fahey points out some of the potential risks and rewards of Xbox’s current strategy of competition through acquisition. A small excerpt:
"The possible future that we originally saw for Xbox – the excitement about Microsoft’s renewed commitment to building up its studios to the point where it could be a genuine rival to Sony’s software slate – hangs in the balance. The alternative, in which almost a hundred billion dollars in total is spent to buy enough publishers to make Microsoft a major player, is probably the reality we’re getting.
“The extent to which that will hamper further development of Microsoft’s own game studios and first-party publishing remains to be seen, but it’s highly unlikely that the effect will be zero; no company, not even Microsoft, has unlimited bandwidth to keep every plate spinning all at once.”
The Series S is proving to be a boat anchor holding the platform back. They should cut it loose and release a digital only Series X to fill the space and call it good.
The Series S and X are extremely similar hardware wise. Games really just need to scale to fit the two targets. The real issue is that the games and game makers which MS owns largely use a lot more CPU power, which doesn’t really scale down as easily as GPU power. Having a PC game maker act like a console game maker is the real gap in skillset, not the dual targets.
Not really… The S only has 10GB of RAM compared to 16 in the X, and the ram it does have runs at less than 1/2 the speed.
8GB of the 10 runs at 224GB/s, the remaining 2GB runs at 56GB/s. That is not a typo.
This is so poor, the S can’t even run the backwards compatible titles with Xbox One X enhancements. The Xbox One X had 12GB running at 336GB/s.
By comparison, the Xbox Series X has 16GB of RAM with 10 running at 560GB/s and 6GB running at 336GB/s
This is why Baldur’s Gate 3 is delayed on the platform, they can’t get split screen working with the meager RAM available in the S.
Fortunately, Microsoft has abandoned the feature parity requirement on the S and X, they can launch thr game without split screen on the S.
https://www.polygon.com/23844411/baldurs-gate-3-xbox-series-x-release-date-2023
The S only has 10GB of RAM compared to 16 in the X,
Yes, and the Switch is an ARM based architecture, the 360 was a PowerPC. Architecturally, the S and the X are very similar. Your argument seems to be “The Series S is slower and has less RAM”, which is true, but games should just scale properly. Lower res and lower framerate targets should work. They aren’t working because the game probably doesn’t scale across some critical axis. That’s basically a bug and they should fix it.
I think it bothers people because they think that Series S is “holding back” Series X, which is simply not how it works. Fixing things fixes them everywhere. Series S makes Series X games run faster and better.
By that argument they could do split screen for Baldur’s Gate 3 if they just ran it at 640x480 in 16 colors, but who would play it? :)
I don’t think there are palette limitations, but many games are running on the Series S at SD with FSR upscaling to 1080P. Quality wise they do look acceptable. See Immportals of Aveum as an example