Some of you forget that 1080p and 1440p are still a big deal today, and these definitions will stay for A LOT OF people.
and you and other people keep forgetting that this machine is not capable of 1080p let alone 1440p for future-next gen games.
it only reliably does 1080p 60 fps in old games like division 2, fallout 4, destiny 2. or old games that are pretending to be new ones (such as hitman 3 or resident evil village, games that have almost completely same graphical fidelity compared to their older ones)
it drops to 720p 60 fps in ac: valhalla. cyberpunk will probably introduce a 720p 60 fps mode for series s with its nextgen patch.
medium runs at 900p/30 fps in single screen and drops to 648p in dual screen.
true test of this console will be made by hellblade 2 and similar games. once those kind of games start to run 720-810p 60 fps on this console, i can assure you, i will have great fun making callbacks to some certain posts in this forum.
because IT will happen. this console will only manage to run hellblade 2 at 810p 60 fps. end of the story. you want anything south of 900p? play at 30 fps. DirectML, like other upscaling tech, won't work efficient enough at such a low resolution. so it wont save the day for series s. at best, it might provide a small bump of image quality, maybe 720p rendering will look like 810p-900p, at best.
on the other hand series x will enjoy 1440p 60 fps and higher quality of directml upscaling. even if you have a 1080p screen, series x is a superior choice because it can output a supersampled image and provide higher quality.
my only gripe is this. people can buy series s if they want or if they're out of budget. but if they're simply buying it because they don't have a 4k screen, they're making a HUGE mistake if they actually have the budget for it. because series x will provide superior quality even on a 1080p panel due to the nature of temporal anti aliasing and resolution scaling.
this is how much supersampling improves a game's image quality AT 1080P:
imagine when native 1080p looks like on the left, how horrible would a game such as RDR 2 would look at 720p-810p (it already runs 864p on One S but runs 1080p on PS4, and naturally players that saw both versions will usually state that PS4 looked superior. 864p is literally 1.3 millions of pixels, while 1080p is actually 1.8 millions of pixels) when you're at a resolution as low as 1080p, you need to STAY THERE to maintain good image quality. even with native 1080p, you can observe how blurry textures become due to
TEMPORAL ANTI ALIASING. Going below 1080p simply should not be a thing developers do for Series S. But they will. Happily. They already do.
Series S will run RDR 2 NATIVE 1080p and 60 FPS. That, I'm sure of. But it will be the best looking game it will ever run at native 1080p, probably. Anything nextgen, will go down below 900p.