Xbox Series S official, priced sharply at just US$299

[Redaktion]

Microsoft's cheaper and less powerful Xbox Series S official. The new console sports a design that has elements of the Xbox Series X design and earlier Xbox One designs. It will also cost just US$299.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Xbox-Series-S-official-priced-sharply-at-just-US-299.492493.0.html

[Danieru]

No discs, only digital. Microsoft worst decision ever.

[danilol]

Thank you for your opinion Tech Insider Danieru.

[Taylor]

My internet is far too slow/unreliable to ever consider a console without the disc drive. Plus for the ocassional time when xbox content usage services go down disc games remain playable but digital never is. That'll be a great console for people with good internet. I know a few relatives that will love it mainly for 4k netflix plus very ocassional games

[Samunosuke]

No discs, only digital. Microsoft worst decision ever.

So I guess Sony's digital only PS5 and the millions of Windows PCs without discs are also terrible decisions. There exists a concept called choice, if you want you can purchase either the Xbox One/Series X which have disc drives.

[Anonym]

No discs, only digital. Microsoft worst decision ever.

It's almost like Microsoft believes there is a pandemic going on and consumers do not want to have to leave their houses or wait for a physical *thing* to arrive. That's a Blockbuster-alike way of thinking in the age of services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu.

[Jordon]

"less power than even the Xbox One X"
Where are they getting this information as its not stated in the article?

[Anonym]

"less power than even the Xbox One X"
Where are they getting this information as its not stated in the article?

The author already erased the initial comments, in which he "explained" that because of that TFLOPS number this console was less powerful than the Xbox One X (going as far as claiming that perhaps it couldn't run the newest games, therefore not a next-gen console).

In those comments I had also replied that TFLOPS is a deceiving unit, because it benchmarks the fastest floating point operation possible within that micro-architecture, which does not translate well when comparing across different micro-architectures (GCN vs RDNA) or even be a particularly representative instruction for real-world games.

[Sanjiv Sathiah]

@Anonym

I didn't erase the initial comments. I deleted the earlier article to reflect that the news which was originally a leak was quickly made official. While it might have a new architecture and ray tracing support, it is clearly less powerful than the Xbox One X -- where that console offered 4K support, this is 1080p/1440p machine. This is well in line with reports that it only delivers 4 teraflops of precision floating point performance in comparison to the 6 teraflops performance of the Xbox One X.

[Blizz]

You cannot compare TFLOPS across architectures. A 4 TFLOP Navi performs as well as a 6 TFLOP Polaris. If you're going to write about tech, at least do your research.

[Anonym]

@Sanjiv Sathiah

I will bite your bait, let's make the exercise of focusing just on those TFLOPS. Although we will be ignoring that this console has a much faster Zen CPU than the One X (better game AI, more NPCs, more complex levels) with a NVMe SSD (much faster asset streaming, page swapping, and loading times), that is the exercise we are doing.

Digital Foundry already compared experimentally if the resulting work of 6TF in the GCN micro-architecture (such as the One X) could be matched by the 4TF of a newer generation AMD GPU (such as Navi or the RDNA2 in Xbox Series S).

Once again, there are caveats because it's only the GPU dimension (the CPU or NVMe SSD will make a huge difference) but the findings were already telling:
youtube.com/watch?v=buUFvV9I-pA