Microsoft is fully detailing its new Xbox Series S console today. The $299 next-gen console will arrive on November 10th, designed to be a more affordable option for 1440p gaming. Microsoft is using the same CPU from the Xbox Series X inside the Series S, running at 3.6Hz. This is only slightly slower than the 3.8GHz speed the Zen 2-based CPU runs at in the Series X. “The primary difference between Xbox Series X and S is the GPU,” explains Jason Ronald, Microsoft’s director of Xbox program management.
“Xbox Series S delivers four times the processing power of an Xbox One console and supports experiences up to 120fps,” says Liz Hamren, head of platform engineering and hardware at Xbox. “The primary difference between Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S is in resolution. Through talking to our customers, we found that many of our fans prioritize framerate over resolution, so we wanted to build a console that didn’t require a 4K TV.”
That led Microsoft to use a different GPU inside the Xbox Series S to bring the price down, one that the company promises is around three times more powerful than the Xbox One. While Microsoft doesn’t go into detailed specifics on the GPU specs, we understand the Xbox Series S has 20 CUs at 1.550GHz. This calculates to around 4 teraflops of performance, compared to the 12 teraflops (52 CUs at 1.825 GHz) found on the larger Xbox Series X. There’s an obvious power gap here, but Microsoft is targeting the Xbox Series S at 1080p or 1440p monitors and TVs, so you don’t need the same GPU power required for things like 4K gaming.
Microsoft is using a hardware scaler on the Xbox Series S to scale up games for 4K on TVs, and there’s even full hardware support for AMD’s latest RDNA 2 feature set, including hardware-accelerated ray tracing, mesh shaders, and variable rate shading. Xbox Series S includes 10GB of GDDR6 memory running at 224Gbps, compared to the 16GB of GDDR6 found on the Xbox Series X.
What all these specs mean is the Xbox Series S should be more than capable of running next-gen games at a lower resolution than the Xbox Series X. The smaller console also has Microsoft’s Xbox Velocity architecture for the custom 512GB SSD, which enables features like Quick Resume to rapidly switch between games.
Microsoft is also using sampler feedback streaming, allowing the Xbox Series S to only load the portions of textures required to render the scene, which should improve memory efficiency and I/O speeds. We’ll know for sure once we get to review both the Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X later this year, but the differences between the two are clearly related to GPU performance.
Microsoft is now planning to launch both the Xbox Series X and Series S on November 10th. The Xbox Series X will be priced at $499, with the smaller Series S priced at $299.
Author: Tom Warren
Source: Theverge
