Xbox Series S console increasingly seen as a next-gen hurdle for game developers as Control Ultimate Edition's boosts for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S are posted

[Iamtylerdurden1]

I find it funny how virtually every comment either calls the devs lazy or implicitly defends Series S with mentions of Cyberpunk, The Medium, and secret sauce.

The first comment was a kid complaining that Microsoft misled him with XSS because they marketed it as the same exact experience as SX but with lower resolution and it's just not the case. U ppl either berate him or ignore him. XSS is indeed dramatically inferior and it's more than just GPU. The memory is significantly slower and there is far less of it. That ofc impacts texture quality/streaming and will certainly limit games built for next gen from the ground up.

Console development is not the same as PC development. Games built exclusively for console can better optimize because they are designing around a specific spec. Hence why they are able to squeeze more out of the limited hardware. Forcing devs to optimize for numerous different specs takes some of the advantage console has away. The more specs there are to optimize for the worse the optimization becomes. That's part of the reason Sony devs can squeeze so much from PlayStation exclusives.

Once devs stop supporting PS4 and XB1 and we see true next gen games XSS will absolutely be a bottleneck. I can't imagine devs in 2025 designing games for a 4 teraflop system with 10gb of slow memory. It will surely limit the possibilities. Most PC games will have higher system requirements than what XSS offers by then as well.

This is the beginning and already devs are complaining about limited hardware on console and we have XSS to thank. Remember how quickly PS4 and XB1 became antiquated? Now imagine Xbox had released another SKU in 2013 with .4 teraflops and 4gb of slower ram? Imagine how quickly that would become outdated and imagine how it would limit next gen? If devs are already saying XSS is limited imagine what they say in a few years?

[Anonym]

I find it funny how virtually every comment either calls the devs lazy or implicitly defends Series S with mentions of Cyberpunk, The Medium, and secret sauce.

I don't find it funny, because that is the truth. There was a quantitative leap forward that goes well beyond Teraflop count. The One X has more TFs than the XSS, but when you are given pretty clear examples (i.e., the most demanding games) showing why that does not matter you simply dismiss it with "I find it funny."

There is less memory and part of it is slower, however Microsoft also introduced different text streaming for the next-gen that lifts both of those requirements. Yet, you also seem to dismiss that.

You are working under the assumption that next-gen is just like all past-generation but with more powerful hardware. It is not. There are massive efficiency improvements that you need to understand before you can begin to see why it's not magic that next-gen games work so well on the XSS (only real problem is that there are so few of those and plenty of the old that rely on the really inefficient streaming).