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[DeepEnigma]

See, now was that so hard to do?

But yea, unfortunately you may be right. Even still, how much could Sony be paying them that even SE would refuse a hefty Gamepass bag (and limit Franchise exposure)?

I would not be surprised if Sony was buying the IP at the very least, or Square Japan (what’s left) in general now that the western IPs were sold off.

It’s a crazy world in consolidation.

 

[Mr Reasonable]

Nvm

 

[vaibhavpisal]

We asked some devs. Both console as well as PC only to get their take on where specs sit and what they do. Then we discussed it during yesterdays 3 hour podcast.

Long story short. Engines, developer skill(something right now that a lot of people don't want to admit), type of game, all will impact if the S is an issue. With 4 of the 20 devs stated flatly, they felt it was awesome and gave them a great base.
4 disliked it for their specific games but made it work pretty easy. 3 Disliking it completely. 9 stating that if the S was gone not all games would get better and they questioned the idea that even current game designs would radically change if only the X and PS5 existed and didn't feel that it was even a part of discussions.
All of them pointed out that the S series memory was a bunghole to work with but that many devs skilled in specifically that work trade their ideas alot between them.

Thanks a lot for this.

What is your channel name? I will check it out.

Any reasonable developer would like a bigger install base instead of a smaller one. Especially when a system is made by experts, they consider a lot of things and these tend to be well thought out decisions since billions of $ are being invested.

 

[DenchDeckard]

I would say that ya for sure. But they are also IN IT. As in they can't not be ok with it for the majority as its popular and it is still very good cpu wise. But like I said a couple hated it.
I should add they seemed to indicate they didn't love any consoles lol.

Haha, so the three that hated it didn't like consoles or did you get the vibe that all of them weren't super keen on consoles in general?

I guess all consoles have limits and you have to work around them but the series S more so with its memory structure.

Appreciate you asking the question and getting actual feedback. Looking forward to listening to the podcast today, if it's up on your channel? I normally try and tune in live on twitch.

 

[cireza]

Ah I didn’t know PS4 was current gen

Switch is also current gen. Maybe that the very idea of generation is totally stupid ? Developers are constrained by the weakest hardware they are asked to put their games on. This can be PCs, Switch, PS4 or maybe Series S someday. But for now, I don't see many games being released only on PS5 + Series without either PC or PS4 included as well.

 

[lostinblue]

As unpopular as Series S can be for developers trying to get their games out and having to optimize a bit, this seems like a load of bullshit.

First of all, it isn't down to developers to decide which platforms to support these days, or there would be no games for PS4/Xbox One already, not because the consoles can't run the games but because of the extra work, it's certainly more extra work than Series S.

I doubt any big publisher is rooting for a current-gen platform with sizeable userbase to be dropped.


This seems to be a bigger problem for medium independent or semi-independent studios that want to target PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X alone and have to support Series S as well, that doesn't translate to "MANY" studios though because most are not doing PS5/Series X exclusives either, they're still developing with the biggest userbase in mind (PS4 and PC), most of these eventually even come out on Switch, so yeah.

Many in this case seems to me as a synonym to 2 or 3 self-managed studios, tops.

As always stated, the Series S was stupid from the jump. While I empathize with those less than who can't afford the cutting edge, they have to wait for sales or save up like I did once upon a time. I couldn't afford a PS3 in 2006. I didn't get my first one until 2008 and the MGS4 bundle. Had to save and plan for it. IF this is true, hopefully it finally reaches Microsoft and progress can be done.

There's nothing wrong with Series S if you think about it as a 1080p box for current gen games.

CPU is the same as the big boys, RAM is not too shabby for 1080p, parity is perfectly possible if you scale back the sizeable assets.

Scaling back assets is not too hard, I feel the issue is that these studios don't want to do that and spend money on quality assurance for that specific version. That said, dropping Series S is bigger in regard to potential sales than dropping PS4 Pro last gen so I really don't get the intention to do so.

Didn't biggest current stress test on next-gen consoles (that Matrix UE5 demo) ran on Series S just fine?

Yup.

The challenge for devs is not CPU nor GPU (unless they're trying to do lots of RT or 1440p60 and up) it's the RAM pool not being the same because that makes it so that they have to make their game fit into that. Game logic is not the issue, it's that they're using all the memory available on PS5/XSX for assets and would like to run the same code, and just change output resolution on the S.

This (running everything as it is on the most powerful platforms) of course would make Series S a bit slower than it is as well (memory bandwidth is not the same, so streaming of huge assets not meant for 1440p and lower would hurt it) so it would be a lose-lose situation for the platform.

It is what it is; the memory pool is not a huge problem, it's just the place where the only sizeable "problem" is located for devs. It's what they have to optimize for which will in turn make their games run better. I will wager that's what Gotham Knight didn't do instead opting to run Xbox Series X code and assets, this translated into a 30FPS drop and them blaming the GPU, it's actually bandwidth/memory and them using more bandwidth than they should have.

Xbox Series X	Xbox Series S
16 GB GDDR6 with 320-bit bus 10 GB @ 560 GB/s, 6 GB @ 336 GB/s	10 GB GDDR6 with 128-bit bus 8 GB @ 224 GB/s, 2 GB @ 56 GB/s

Less than half bandwidth on main RAM. Secondary RAM doesn't matter for Series S because it's precisely the 2 GB reserved for the OS whereas on Series X they're surely using about 4 GB of that secondary memory for game logic and the bandwidth allows it, this probably allows them to reduce some latency too, as if they organize things they're not taking much from the GPU bandwidth. Anyway, if they do it like this, and the game is bandwidth hungry, then when scaling down the code for Series S it'll be easy for it to be be bandwidth deprived.

Also, for comparison sake, Xbox one did 68.3 GB/s on main RAM, PS4 did 176 GB/s. Xbox Series S is a 1080p console through and through by right, it has no business going higher than that most of the time.

Solution is still optimizing the assets, asset streaming and in some cases be conservative with the output resolution.

On light of that, Gotham Knights opted for 1440p30, most certainly because the difference in resolution still wouldn't allow for 60 fps with their code. But that's what they should have delivered, 1080p60. Reconstruction techniques will probably eventually help a lot as well.

 

[xHunter]

The most accurate answer is that Sony have paid Square to keep it console exclusive. The game itself can run on base PS4 level hardware and the PC requirements, as pointed out in the post above mine, are nothing to write home about. We've also seen games more demanding than FFVII R running on Series S already.

Marketing has prevented FFVII R from getting an Xbox release so far.

How can sony block something that never existed?

There was no Xbox version of the game when they made the deal.

 

[adamsapple]

How can sony block something that never existed?

There was no Xbox version of the game when they made the deal.

Read the last line again though, no one's talking about taking an existing version away from anyone

 

[xHunter]

Read the last line again though, no one's talking about taking an existing version away from anyone

You mean like Starfield?
I wasnt talking about taking existing versions away.

 

[twilo99]

I think the Series S was designed with FSR 2.0 in mind so we need more games with that enabled..

 

[adamsapple]

I wasnt talking about taking existing versions away.

Neither was I

I think the Series S was designed with FSR 2.0 in mind so we need more games with that enabled..

FSR 2.0 isn't free tho, it also requires some GPU grunt. In Scorn's example, it uses FSR 2 on Series X but not on Series S. Not sure how much overhead they had in that case.

 

[Goalus]

How can sony block something that never existed?

By forbidding the developers to develop it which is exactly what Sony does.

 

[deriks]

Hey, remember when the PS4 and XOne were potatos as soon as they released, but some games are still better looking then than some games now?

 

[lostinblue]

FSR 2.0 isn't free tho, it also requires some GPU grunt. In Scorn's example, it uses FSR 2 on Series X but not on Series S. Not sure how much overhead they had in that case.

Well, games on the Steam Deck are using it.

With the Steam Deck being as powerful as a base PS4 I don't think there's anything stopping Series S, in the long run from using it.

 

[twilo99]

FSR 2.0 isn't free tho, it also requires some GPU grunt. In Scorn's example, it uses FSR 2 on Series X but not on Series S. Not sure how much overhead they had in that case.

Oh, I thought they used it for both.. so the series s might not be powerful enough to run FSR 2.0 ?

That would be a huge mistake from the design team at Microsoft.

 

[twilo99]

 

[adamsapple]

Oh, I thought they used it for both.. so the series s might not be powerful enough to run FSR 2.0 ?

That would be a huge mistake from the design team at Microsoft.

Yeah, I found that weird as well. Series S seems like the kind of hardware which would benefit the most from upscalers like that.

For Scorn, Series S uses the UE4's built-in temporal upscaler. It's decent enough but not as good as FSR 2.0

 

[xHunter]

By forbidding the developers to develop it which is exactly what Sony does.

Would you say that the same thing happened with Starfield?

 

[Three]

By forbidding the developers to develop it which is exactly what Sony does.

The developers signed the deal so they didn’t want to make it anyway. Nobody is forbidding it.

(am I playing Adamsapple's pedantic game right?)

 

[ManaByte]

 

[adamsapple]

The developers signed the deal so they didn’t want to make it anyway. Nobody is forbidding it.

(am I playing Adamsapple's pedantic game right?)

No, because I'm not talking about taking away a supposed existing version of Starfield from other consoles. My post plainly said that it's the reason there's no Xbox version at all.

The original point was about whether Series S *could* run the game on a hardware level, which of course it could as there are versions of the game which run on much weaker hardware than Series S.

I've always thought that development is done top-down, i-e the game is made on more powerful dev kits/PC hardware and then scaled down to consoles.

This tweet makes a lot of sense in that sense.

 

[Panajev2001a]

Depending on the games, we are not talking about AAAA titles there. Some titles can be built and scale down to 1080p on older HW like base Xbox One… so? We can keep posting the same indie all we want, but not sure what it will accomplish. More HW profiles, more money adding features and testing them and ensuring they work alright. It helps when there is an additional SKU you can sell and dev in parallel or after the console launch by another dev or if you design for the top end HW and do not care much about the low end too sure…

 

[Three]

No, because I'm not talking about taking away a supposed existing version of Starfield from other consoles. My post plainly said that it's the reason there's no Xbox version at all.

The original point was about whether Series S *could* run the game on a hardware level, which of course it could as there are versions of the game which run on much weaker hardware than Series S.

I got the gist of it already and I agree this has nothing to do with why FF7 isn't on XSS but it's clear someone is poking fun at the pedantic idea you had that an aquisition hasn't removed Starfield from PS because it never existed in the first place. Neither did FF7R for xbox by that logic and the devs didn't want it to.

 

[Goalus]

Would you say that the same thing happened with Starfield?

If it really doesn't come to Playstation, then yes of course. FF7R was made exclusive before Starfield though, and Sony supposedly tried the same with Starfield. Starfield Xbox exclusivity is therefore just the revenge.

 

[reksveks]

9 stating that if the S was gone not all games would get better and they questioned the idea that even current game designs would radically change if only the X and PS5 existed and didn't feel that it was even a part of discussions.

The unspoken truth of it all imo.

Game design is a bit static/iterative nowday

 

[Foilz]

I can see this as an in issue if the games are trying to target mainly the high end hardware for PC and console but the PC alone has 2000 different hardware configurations. 95% of Devs put quality sliders in their games inorder to get games playable on everyone shardware. I would say half of PC gamers have hardware less capable than the series S and it doesn't seem to be an issue there. I call BS

 

[SomeGit]

The unspoken truth of it all imo.

Game design is a bit static/iterative nowday

This is the source of all this drama, we’ve seen people here constantly scapegoat not only the Series S but also stuff like cross gen development, graphics options, 60 fps, pc ports, etc etc

They are hoping for a monumental change in both game design and fidelity, the truly next gen games and all these “new stuff” is holding back the industry rather than the simple truth that games have become iterative and safe since the PS360 gen.

 

[Ezekiel_]

I've always thought that development is done top-down, i-e the game is made on more powerful dev kits/PC hardware and then scaled down to consoles.

This tweet makes a lot of sense in that sense.

We don't have to play guessing games, you know.

We've had close to two years now worth of games releasing on serers s.

Either thousands of devs deliberately want to sabotage the s version of their game - by not only lowering resolution/frame targets, but also graphical settings - or scaling down isn't always as straight froward as lowering resolution targets and calling it a day.

 

[jumpship]

Uh....just optimize it for XSX and PS5 and just lower the resolution and FPS for Series S! .......... There! Solved!

Can I just ask, do you think devs are stupid or something? We're talking about highly qualified devs with years of experience making games for a living. If some have issues with Series S then who are you or I to not believe them.

And you like many in this thread are looking at this wrong. Performance optimization normally happens towards the END of development and even after launch.

Having just released a game and now with experience of developing on Series S the devs in the OP are talking about the START of a new project. A time when game design, scope, features and such are discussed within the team. All those things will take up Ram and non of which can be suitably fixed by lowering res or texture sizes if enough Ram isn't available. We need to take away some of the cynicism toward devs I'm sure they want to be proud of their work and produce the best games possible for gamers. If a dev has an ambitious enough idea for a game that cannot fit inside the confines of Series S then game design may need to be dialled back, scope reduced or features removed entirely. Leading "Many" frustrated developers to have talks with MS who don't want to compromise on their vision and instead asking to remove Series S from requirements (even if naive, the Series S is going no where). They're fighting for what's best for their game and by extension gamers.

The last thing you want to do is frustrate or make things difficult for devs. Ask Sony with PS3 CELL / split ram pools, but even then the ram and power was there just hard to access its full potential. After which PS4 was completely dev focused through out development.

Of course its too late now, the dye is cast, we'll still get games, great games I'm sure. Just not always what a dev originally intended at the start. Compromises will need to be made somewhere or in worst case scenario game ideas shelved entirely for something else until suitable hardware is available without restrictions.

This of course can play straight into Sony's hands, ready to roll out the red carpet to incentivise developers make the game PS5 / PC only.

Next time MS if you want a reduced cost SKU, just remove the drive and leave the innards alone.

 

[Panajev2001a]

Can I just ask, do you think devs are stupid or something? We're talking about highly qualified devs with years of experience making games for a living. If some have issues with Series S then who are you or I to not believe them.

And you like many in this thread are looking at this wrong. Performance optimization normally happens towards the END of development and even after launch.

Having just released a game and now with experience of developing on Series S the devs in the OP are talking about the START of a new project. A time when game design, scope, features and such are discussed within the team. All those things will take up Ram and non of which can be suitably fixed by lowering res or texture sizes if enough Ram isn't available. We need to take away some of the cynicism toward devs I'm sure they want to be proud of their work and produce the best games possible for gamers. If a dev has an ambitious enough idea for a game that cannot fit inside the confines of Series S then game design may need to be dialled back, scope reduced or features removed entirely. Leading "Many" frustrated developers to have talks with MS who don't want to compromise on their vision and instead asking to remove Series S from requirements (even if naive, the Series S is going no where). They're fighting for what's best for their game and by extension gamers.

The last thing you want to do is frustrate or make things difficult for devs. Ask Sony with PS3 CELL / split ram pools, but even then the ram and power was there just hard to access its full potential. After which PS4 was completely dev focused through out development.

Of course its too late now, the dye is cast, we'll still get games, great games I'm sure. Just not always what a dev originally intended at the start. Compromises will need to be made somewhere or in worst case scenario game ideas shelved entirely for something else until suitable hardware is available without restrictions.

This of course can play straight into Sony's hands, ready to roll out the red carpet to incentivise developers make the game PS5 / PC only.

Next time MS if you want a reduced cost SKU, just remove the drive and leave the innards alone.

Maybe even cut some of the SSD storage… but hey… .

 

[//DEVIL//]

I've always thought that development is done top-down, i-e the game is made on more powerful dev kits/PC hardware and then scaled down to consoles.

This tweet makes a lot of sense in that sense.

I believe that's the case too but not when it comes to PC / Consoles.

top-down first on consoles, then to S/One/PS4

that high-end console version gets upgraded to the PC version.

If they target the PC first, consoles will not get a decent copy considering the difference between a high-end PC to PS5 is about 2x to 3x more powerful ( 4x if you wanna count the 4090)

 

[Klosshufvud]

Can I just ask, do you think devs are stupid or something? We're talking about highly qualified devs with years of experience making games for a living. If some have issues with Series S then who are you or I to not believe them.

And you like many in this thread are looking at this wrong. Performance optimization normally happens towards the END of development and even after launch.

Having just released a game and now with experience of developing on Series S the devs in the OP are talking about the START of a new project. A time when game design, scope, features and such are discussed within the team. All those things will take up Ram and non of which can be suitably fixed by lowering res or texture sizes if enough Ram isn't available. We need to take away some of the cynicism toward devs I'm sure they want to be proud of their work and produce the best games possible for gamers. If a dev has an ambitious enough idea for a game that cannot fit inside the confines of Series S then game design may need to be dialled back, scope reduced or features removed entirely. Leading "Many" frustrated developers to have talks with MS who don't want to compromise on their vision and instead asking to remove Series S from requirements (even if naive, the Series S is going no where). They're fighting for what's best for their game and by extension gamers.

The last thing you want to do is frustrate or make things difficult for devs. Ask Sony with PS3 CELL / split ram pools, but even then the ram and power was there just hard to access its full potential. After which PS4 was completely dev focused through out development.

Of course its too late now, the dye is cast, we'll still get games, great games I'm sure. Just not always what a dev originally intended at the start. Compromises will need to be made somewhere or in worst case scenario game ideas shelved entirely for something else until suitable hardware is available without restrictions.

This of course can play straight into Sony's hands, ready to roll out the red carpet to incentivise developers make the game PS5 / PC only.

Next time MS if you want a reduced cost SKU, just remove the drive and leave the innards alone.

We have every reason to be sceptical. Gotham Knight just released as a current-gen only title. And it's obvious all the horse power of the consoles went into masking an extremely poor optimization process, not for some grand unseen vision. This is what we're afraid of and what we've already seen several times. From a technical perspective, Series S has the necessary components to keep up with Series X, albeit at lower resolution with reduced ray tracing. I'm really wondering what that hypothetical game is that can run on a Series X but not on Series S. Is one that pushes the GPU so hard that even on Series X it's capped to 1080p 30 fps? Then I say good luck trying to sell a game like that in 2022. Especially with your PC port that has to take into account that people own lesser GPUs than GTX 2070. I just can't see what this hypothetical game is that could only work on top-tier GPUs and nothing else. The only ones we've seen thus far are trainwrecks like Gotham Knights.

 

[SomeGit]

Maybe even cut some of the SSD storage… but hey… .

Half the SSD and the optical drive won’t be enough to cut the price as aggressive as MS was planning.

People need to stop comparing the PS5 DE with the Series S, other than being a price reduced version of the “real” console they have nothing else in common.

One is a loss console that is basically used to mark a price point, while having a low number of units. (There were some number in the past of basically 1:10 to the regular PS5)

The other was a console design to hit a low sustainable price point for mass market with greater potential for cost saving down the line, this is why Series S numbers are matching the Series X.

Their goal differ heavily, and while you may disagree on the goals simply making a diskless Series X isn’t the same.

 

[Panajev2001a]

Half the SSD and the optical drive won’t be enough to cut the price as aggressive as MS was planning.

People need to stop comparing the PS5 DE with the Series S, other than being a price reduced version of the “real” console they have nothing else in common.

One is a loss console that is basically used to mark a price point, while having a low number of units. (There were some number in the past of basically 1:10 to the regular PS5)

The other was a console design to hit a low sustainable price point for mass market with greater potential for cost saving down the line, this is why Series S numbers are matching the Series X.

Their goal differ heavily, and while you may disagree on the goals simply making a diskless Series X isn’t the same.

MS was planning a pincher manoeuvre against what they perceived Sony was attempting (high spec and higher price single SKU). When they designed the machine they could not predict COVID or a semiconductor shortage or a recession or anything.

What they also achieved is fragmenting the Xbox Series console ecosystem: consoles’ entire raison d’etre is single set of fixed specs… the more profiles you add to target the more you are adding complexity (higher end HW unused or low end HW screwed over).

 

[Ozriel]

Can I just ask, do you think devs are stupid or something? We're talking about highly qualified devs with years of experience making games for a living. If some have issues with Series S then who are you or I to not believe them.

And you like many in this thread are looking at this wrong. Performance optimization normally happens towards the END of development and even after launch.

Having just released a game and now with experience of developing on Series S the devs in the OP are talking about the START of a new project.

‘The devs’?
There’s only ONE dev in the OP. ONE. And that dev is clearly talking BS. Nobody sane is having meetings asking to drop Series S because that’s already a given that isn’t happening.

A time when game design, scope, features and such are discussed within the team. All those things will take up Ram and non of which can be suitably fixed by lowering res or texture sizes if enough Ram isn't available. We need to take away some of the cynicism toward devs I'm sure they want to be proud of their work and produce the best games possible for gamers. If a dev has an ambitious enough idea for a game that cannot fit inside the confines of Series S then game design may need to be dialled back, scope reduced or features removed entirely. Leading "Many" frustrated developers to have talks with MS who don't want to compromise on their vision and instead asking to remove Series S from requirements (even if naive, the Series S is going no where). They're fighting for what's best for their game and by extension gamers.

so far, there’s nothing released or on the horizon that can’t have RAM requirements reduced by reduced resolution and texture size. Certainly not anything put out by Bossa Studios.

Given that they use the exact same CPU, there’s no scope reduction that can be envisaged. You’ll have the exact same open world, same physics, same everything. Just looking worse.

If you truly believe devs or studios are talking to Microsoft about dropping Series S, that would be the height of gullibility.

The last thing you want to do is frustrate or make things difficult for devs. Ask Sony with PS3 CELL / split ram pools, but even then the ram and power was there just hard to access its full potential. After which PS4 was completely dev focused through out development.

Certainly, optimizing for the smaller memory pool on Series S will lead to dev difficulty. But it’s a whole different kettle of fish from the PS3 situation, and for many devs, the difficulty will be offset by the increased sales potential for games on Series S.

Of course its too late now, the dye is cast, we'll still get games, great games I'm sure. Just not always what a dev originally intended at the start. Compromises will need to be made somewhere or in worst case scenario game ideas shelved entirely for something else until suitable hardware is available without restrictions.

on the flagship consoles, You will never get anything different from what devs planned to implement. Development - as always - will target the flagships and passes will be made to step down the games to run on Series S.

We might get to the end of gen with games running at 900p on Series S. But they’ll run.

It also helps that MS clearly has no objections to other, non-resolution cutbacks on Series S.

This of course can play straight into Sony's hands, ready to roll out the red carpet to incentivise developers make the game PS5 / PC only.

I’ve seen this theory put forward multiple times and This has always seemed like console warrior’s wet dream. AA games and indies should have no issue running on the XSS, and big AAA devs can afford the extra effort to scale their games down.
Not many devs will choose to lose out on potentially significant sales numbers because they want to avoid the pain point of optimizing on Series S.

And like I’ve said before, devs will still have to make their games for the next gen Switch which will be weaker than the Series S. Not to mention future iterations of Steamdeck which should have GPUs in the same power range.

 

[SomeGit]

MS was planning a pincher manoeuvre against what they perceived Sony was attempting (high spec and higher price single SKU). When they designed the machine they could not predict COVID or a semiconductor shortage or a recession or anything.

What they also achieved is fragmenting the Xbox Series console ecosystem: consoles’ entire raison d’etre is single set of fixed specs… the more profiles you add to target the more you are adding complexity (higher end HW unused or low end HW screwed over).

You don’t need COVID or semiconductor shortage to predict that RAM and Silicon prices weren’t scaling down as much as they used to, this is the reason the RAM difference between last and current gen doesn’t hit the same exponential difference as previous gens, as stated by both Sony and MS, even ignoring the Series S.

That was always the plan, I don’t even need to speculate, they said this when the console was announced. Having a 400$ Series S would be the same goal as the current 300$ Series S and it would be unlikely that you’ll be able to scale them to price points that the Series S will be able to go as the generation goes on.

 

[SSfox]

We can also see this as positive, the devs that really are annoyed by being forced to make games for Series, can also say FUCK it, we're just gonna make it PS5 exclusive.

 

[twilo99]

Yeah, I found that weird as well. Series S seems like the kind of hardware which would benefit the most from upscalers like that.

For Scorn, Series S uses the UE4's built-in temporal upscaler. It's decent enough but not as good as FSR 2.0

Yes it doesn’t make much sense. Maybe we need to wait for first party games to take full advantage, but if they end up not using it then there is something wrong with series s.



This was back in June so official support has been there for a while now.

No mention of the series s not supporting it and also no mention of the PS5 at all for some strange reason.

AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution 2 (FSR 2)

Learn even more about our new open-source temporal upscaling solution FSR 2, and get the source code and documentation!

gpuopen.com

 

[Ozriel]

MS was planning a pincher manoeuvre against what they perceived Sony was attempting (high spec and higher price single SKU). When they designed the machine they could not predict COVID or a semiconductor shortage or a recession or anything.

MS made the Series S as an affordable, mass market console to drive up Gamepass numbers.

Has nothing to do with a ‘pincer maneuver’ against Sony.

What they also achieved is fragmenting the Xbox Series console ecosystem: consoles’ entire raison d’etre is single set of fixed specs… the more profiles you add to target the more you are adding complexity (higher end HW unused or low end HW screwed over).

Same dev environment, and devs target high end and scale down to low end. There’s no disuse of Higher end features or shortchanging lower end users.

You can pretty much see this in all games that've been released this generation. First and third parties.

 

[Ozriel]

We can also this as positive, the devs that really are annoyed by being forced to make games for Series, can also say FUCK it, we're just gonna make it PS5 exclusive.

“I’m so mad about being asked to drop reduction, cut effects/texture size and drop RT that i’m going to turn my back on an audience of tens of millions of consoles. It doesn’t matter that I was gonna have to do all these anyway to make my game run on Nintendo’s Switch 2 or on millions of Steamdecks”.

Tell you for free that this is an extremely unlikely scenario. Don’t get your hopes up.

 

[CatLady]

Would you say that the same thing happened with Starfield?

No, Xbox actually owns the IP and the studio making the Starfield. They can do whatever they want with their own games. It would be more akin to Sony paying Arkane and Tango, both studios they do NOT own, to block their games on Xbox for 1 year.

 

[jumpship]

We have every reason to be sceptical. Gotham Knight just released as a current-gen only title. And it's obvious all the horse power of the consoles went into masking an extremely poor optimization process, not for some grand unseen vision. This is what we're afraid of and what we've already seen several times. From a technical perspective, Series S has the necessary components to keep up with Series X, albeit at lower resolution with reduced ray tracing. I'm really wondering what that hypothetical game is that can run on a Series X but not on Series S. Is one that pushes the GPU so hard that even on Series X it's capped to 1080p 30 fps? Then I say good luck trying to sell a game like that in 2022. Especially with your PC port that has to take into account that people own lesser GPUs than GTX 2070. I just can't see what this hypothetical game is that could only work on top-tier GPUs and nothing else. The only ones we've seen thus far are trainwrecks like Gotham Knights.

Yeah I get it, game development is difficult and Gotham Knights might be a bad example as development included last gen consoles up till their recent cancellation. Meaning from the start game design and features would have no problem on Series S.

Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't the S remove raytracing in Gotham? That's fine its acceptable to fall back to SS reflection / cubemaps. But what if there is some other graphical features possible on the X without an easy and fast fallback for series S. Not all games are equal so any issues will depend on what the developer plans to make, but there must be good reason that a number of devs have made public there frustrations.

 

[Klosshufvud]

Yeah I get it, game development is difficult and Gotham Knights might be a bad example as development included last gen consoles up till their recent cancellation. Meaning from the start game design and features would have no problem on Series S.

Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't the S remove raytracing in Gotham? That's fine its acceptable to fall back to SS reflection / cubemaps. But what if there is some other graphical features possible on the X without an easy and fast fallback for series S. Not all games are equal so any issues will depend on what the developer plans to make, but there must be good reason that a number of devs have made public there frustrations.

We still don't know what those "good number of devs" are. We have nothing solid. All hearsay. Even the dude who said Gotham Knight was 30 fps due to Series S ended up being wrong. This is my issue with this whole circus. I'd love to hear what those restrictions actually directly from devs but all we get are Twitter rumors and whispers. I need something more substantial than that to take all of this seriously.

Maybe you're right, maybe not. All of this is too speculative to make any conclusions of.

 

[DarkMage619]

MS has developed tools for developers to mitigate memory issues on Series S. Until those devs actually invest resources into building a workflow that incorporate those tools, I can't take their concerns as legitimate.

If those "memory multipliers", that MS engineers were touting, do end up being insufficient then these complaints would hold water. I personally cannot speak to the effectiveness of these tools, but I do recall that MS included hardware that accelerated these operations. It seems insincere to make the claim that the hardware is incapable of handling their vision, when they are aren't using said hardware in the manner that it was engineered to be used.

It's akin to early PS3 developers not using the SPE's, then complaining about the capabilities of the Cell. In that example, it took awhile for devs to come to grips with the hardware, but it was shown to be quite performant when used correctly.

This cannot be emphasized enough. If developers aren't utilizing the features of the XSS to save on the RAM they claim is lacking how serious are their complaints? Unless MS is refusing to support developers who are currently struggling with the XSS this largely seems like a non-issue.

I've yet to see any games that could run perfectly fine on a XSX but would not run on the XSS no matter what optimization were made. The system will certainly take effort seeing how it's an additional platform but it's perfectly capable of running this generations of games. That Matrix demo was an excellent proof of concept in that regard.

 

[Panajev2001a]

Same dev environment, and devs target high end and scale down to low end.

I can see this in games like CyberPunk on PS4 sure, but no it is not a sane way to design games IMHO (scaling down).

 

[Ozriel]

I can see this in games like CyberPunk on PS4 sure, but no it is not a sane way to design games IMHO (scaling down).

You design games with the high end in mind. That’s all there is to it.
Then scale down to lower end/minimum requirements. Reduce resolution, cull some expensive effects and reduce some texture sizes to fit the smaller memory pool.

It’s THE sane way to develop games…and that’s how all multiplatform games will be developed when the next gen Switch is released.

 

[Panajev2001a]

MS has developed tools for developers to mitigate memory issues on Series S. Until those devs actually invest resources into building a workflow that incorporate those tools, I can't take their concerns as legitimate.

If those "memory multipliers", that MS engineers were touting, do end up being insufficient then these complaints would hold water. I personally cannot speak to the effectiveness of these tools, but I do recall that MS included hardware that accelerated these operations. It seems insincere to make the claim that the hardware is incapable of handling their vision, when they are aren't using said hardware in the manner that it was engineered to be used.

It's akin to early PS3 developers not using the SPE's, then complaining about the capabilities of the Cell. In that example, it took awhile for devs to come to grips with the hardware, but it was shown to be quite performant when used correctly.

Or those memory multipliers are also used for the XSX version making using them on the XSS less magical (on top of potentially being oversold / sold with hand wavey baseline explanation [seemed to imply devs were not already using fine grained texture streaming]?).

 

[Dust-by-Monday]

Switch is also current gen. Maybe that the very idea of generation is totally stupid ? Developers are constrained by the weakest hardware they are asked to put their games on. This can be PCs, Switch, PS4 or maybe Series S someday. But for now, I don't see many games being released only on PS5 + Series without either PC or PS4 included as well.

Oh I wasn’t aware that it was mandatory to release every current gen game on switch or PS4.

 

[Panajev2001a]

You design games with the high end in mind. That’s all there is to it.
Then scale down to lower end/minimum requirements. Reduce resolution, cull some expensive effects and reduce some texture sizes to fit the smaller memory pool.

No not really, designing for your recommended specs and scaling up is a choice that makes most sense as you have a clear minimum target to reach and you can scale up afterwards as you optimise towards the end of the project (increasing rendering resolution and framerate and/or effects and texture resolution, AF samples, etc…).

You do not take a software problem and make it harder on yourself towards the end. I mean you can and you will likely have something performing poorly on the low end target you did not factor for.

It’s THE sane way to develop games…

If you are early Crytek and do not care about the low end PC’s, let users mod the game and optimise the settings on their own maybe …

and that’s how all multiplatform games will be developed when the next gen Switch is released.

If you say so... Switch again is a new SKU that gets developed separately and by a separate team so it is not even the same scenario but …

 

[SomeGit]

If you are early Crytek and do not care about the low end PC’s, let users mod the game and optimise the settings on their own maybe …

That’s not really how even Crytek functioned, that’s somewhat true for the higher settings but their games always scaled fine, people just love to create hyperboles around them. I remember running Crysis and Far Cry at acceptable framerates on a Radeon 2600 Pro and Radeon 9250 and they were anything but high end.

Plus you have lots of interviews from the Far Cry days were their lead GFX programmer (can remember the name, only that he was Portuguese) and having the game run well on a GF3 Ti was always a concern.