Arkage posted:

Thanks for the tips. I'm waffling on the whole thing since it really feels like xbox exclusive 1st party stuff poo poo the bed this gen for the most part. If they had Sony quality and quantity output I wouldn't be nearly so hesitant on the gamepass. Also debating whether I should just go with the Xbox game pass rather than ultimate, since their PC offerings aren't that appealing to me... but I guess if you get xbox game pass you still need to pay for live separately? Or no? Confusing.

Ruffian Price posted:

Also, they'll be doing a 4:1 conversion of accrued EA Play subscription to extend your Ultimate and depending on the region, a year of EA Play can be cheaper than a month of Ultimate so check that out. Hungarian MS Store let me buy two years of EA Play so come November that's six months of Ultimate added for the price of two.

quote:

Kicking off with games running on the vintage 2001 Xbox - the 'OG' machine - we've confirmed that Xbox Series S will run these games at an enhanced resolution. There's a 3x boost to resolution on both axes, meaning that titles targeting 480p on the original machine will hit a maximum of 1440p on Series S, presumably with a range of performance benefits. The good news continues with the enhanced Xbox 360 titles that were released for Xbox One X. These games will also be enhanced for Series S, this time running with a 2x2 resolution multiplier, bringing titles that ran at native 720p up to 1440p. While this doesn't match the max 4K we saw on Xbox One X, there is the potential for improved performance elsewhere thanks to the much faster Zen 2 CPU architecture. In scenarios where Xbox One X was limited by its Jaguar CPU cores, Series S has much more headroom.

quote:

It's already been confirmed that the ways in which Series S and Series X handle Xbox One titles varies. Only the Series X will benefit from Xbox One X enhancements to existing games - which typically boils down to resolution boosts, higher quality textures and other graphics-driven effects. Xbox Series S brings its additional horsepower to bear in improving the experience of Xbox One S titles instead. This is more limiting in some respects (a game hard-coded to run at 900p will not run any higher on Series S, for example) but the new console benefits from increased resolutions in games that use dynamic resolution scaling, as well as improvements to texture filtering quality. Obviously, running games from solid state storage reduces loading times significantly, while the Auto HDR feature we've seen running on Series X also features on Series S - all games should present nicely on HDR screens, whether they natively support high dynamic range or not. It's a feature I personally can't wait to test. Finally, it goes without saying that CPU-limited titles should also deliver more stable performance at target frame-rates.

quote:

However, there is one more feature that Microsoft has only mentioned in passing - and now we know more details, we're excited by it: the idea that select Xbox One titles will run at double the frame-rate on the new consoles, including Series S.

"We designed the Series S to enhance the Xbox One S games in a way that the Xbox One X can't do," system architect Andrew Goossen tells us. "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 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."

Stux posted:

wow it runs the games better at 900p than the console running them in 4k??? incredible how do they manage it

Quantum of Phallus posted:

I hope they add more bc games

Shirkelton posted:

They've pretty much always expanded their BC libraries, haven't they?

Crafty posted:

Don’t get upset stux. Better performance for backwards compatibility than One X is a Good thing

Stux posted:

hamstrung by garbage ram yet again lol

American McGay posted:

Very few (do any?) Xbox One S games run at a locked 720p.

Storm One posted:

It's not the RAM but the lower CU count in the GPU though??? It's designed NOT to run games at 4K, for that there's the XSX.

American McGay posted:

Pretty weirdly disingenuous post. Very few (do any?) Xbox One S games run at a locked 720p. So the "quadrupling the resolution" comment is a bit off. Also, Gears has been shown to run at 120fps, so that's not "doubling the frame rate" that is in fact, quadrupling it.

I would much rather have a game run at 60fps in 4K though, as opposed to 900p120 or whatever that Gears demo was running at. That's why I won't be buying a Series S. But I'm not gonna make a weird and also inaccurate post trying to dunk on it.

Stux posted:

Storm One posted:

Agreed on all that but the whole point is that the S is not supposed to run at 4K, period. Not BC, not Series titles, it's a 1080p system. Who cares if it's the RAM or the GPU or both limiting it? It's limited by design, to be cheaper and smaller, that's the whole point.

Stux posted:

its very easy to push your frame rate up to 60 when your games are locked to 720-900p. only doubling the frame rate vs quadrupling the resolution would generally be understood as worse performance. its shocking their new console with a better cpu and gpu is so horrifically hamstrung by garbage ram yet again lol

Crafty posted:

If that’s the case why are you so upset about it baby?

Will be interesting to see the digital foundry stuff with the cross platform titles. Guess series x will be the best place to play, curious to see how PS5 and Series S do in terms of frame rates considering they will have different resolution goals. Always preferred a better frame rate over higher resolution.

Crafty posted:

If that’s the case why are you so upset about it baby?

Will be interesting to see the digital foundry stuff with the cross platform titles. Guess series x will be the best place to play, curious to see how PS5 and Series S do in terms of frame rates considering they will have different resolution goals. Always preferred a better frame rate over higher resolution.

Real hurthling! posted:

Ms would have done better to buy gddr6 at a decent, commonly sought speed and take a slightly larger loss now but have more opportunity for savings later instead of 2 total dead end specs for series s where in 2022 they are the only company on earth trying to source gddr6 at 56gb/s

Stux posted:

post av combo

Ok Comboomer posted:

pot/kettle

Corin Tucker's Stalker posted:

I'm looking forward to seeing how original Xbox games look + perform on the Series X. I still have a huge Xbox (run through an OSSC for clean scaling and scanlines) because I enjoy the library and hardware, but it would be cool to revisit some of those games with steady/high framerates.

Stux posted:

Corin Tucker's Stalker posted:

I'm looking forward to seeing how original Xbox games look + perform on the Series X. I still have a huge Xbox (run through an OSSC for clean scaling and scanlines) because I enjoy the library and hardware, but it would be cool to revisit some of those games with steady/high framerates.

Ok Comboomer posted:

I guarantee that you don’t know the context behind my batshit weirdo red-texts (I have a secret fan in D&D who doesn’t like it when I say things like “there’s no such thing as a good republican” and who’s bought me six new Avs of various degrees of craziness/offensiveness since late July, when everybody with any decency had long decided not to give lowtax anymore money, and who put this week’s model up after I had the mods take down the lovely photo of the Wisconsin shooter he had up before) but I’ve read enough of your posting to exclusively read it as though it’s being vomited out of your Av at like a million miles a second.

Storm One posted:

Agreed on all that but the whole point is that the S is not supposed to run at 4K, period. Not BC, not Series titles, it's a 1080p system. Who cares if it's the RAM or the GPU or both limiting it? It's limited by design, to be cheaper and smaller, that's the whole point.