Xbox has two offerings in its lineup this year. After leading with the Xbox Series X, they recently revealed the Xbox Series S, a cheaper console priced at $299, all-digital, and capable of 1440p gaming. Many questions about gameplay and compatibility have come up, and now we have some insight into the performance of the Xbox Series S.
We recently found out that the Xbox Series S will play Xbox One games with Xbox One X enhancements. This was a bit of a letdown for many. The new-gen console seemed nerfed in comparison to the last-gen Xbox One X. Apparently, the Xbox Series S won’t be too weak, as it will be able to run older games at twice the frame rates.
Series S System Architect Andrew Goossen revealed this in an interview with Digital Foundry:
“We made it easy for existing Xbox One S games to be updated to run with double the frame-rate when played on Series S as well. When games are updated, existing games can query to determine whether they’re running on the new console. And in terms of the performance, the Xbox Series S provides well over double the effective CPU and GPU performance over the Xbox One, making it pretty straightforward for the games to do this. And in fact, the Series S GPU runs the Xbox One S games with better performance than the Xbox One X.
There’s no real perf tuning necessary when you do this, and so often it’s just as easy as changing three lines of code, and then the game works.”
This sounds simple. You just change some code, and the games are ready to fly on the Xbox Series S. If this does pan out, it will put the Series S at an incredible value. Especially for users looking for a next-gen console on the cheap. Goossen did say that the changes might be more in some cases, but still relatively minor:
“Even when it’s not that easy, the fixes are still pretty minor. We had one triple-A title where doubling the frame-rate really worked perfectly, except that the crowd animation was twice as fast as normal. And so, those sorts of fixes are typically very, very easy for developers to go fix. We’re working with game developers and publishers to update [their titles]. It’ll basically be select games that run at a doubled frame-rate on the Series S.”
The Xbox Series S and X both, will release November 10th. Pre-orders start tomorrow. Are you excited? Hit us up in the comments, down below!
Via Wccftech
