Topic: The everything Xbox thread

Good grief, I hope you all have both your kidneys still. You're gonna need them.

Yeah if expansion cart costs $220 I don't believe anyone will get it. And you kind of need it with Series S.

@DarthNocturnal The SSD technology is not new yes but they stated it was a "custom" SSD so there might be something to it.

When it comes out I will definitely watch some teardowns of the SSDs to see if it was a marketing trick or some kind of custom DRM.

If the rumoured price for the memory cards ends up true, Series S and Series X will probably be the new PS Vita.

@Octane Box office numbers don't lie. Homecoming(Peter Parker) made a billion dollars in the box office while into the spider verse(Miles Morales) didn't even come close to matching it. So no, I don't think casuals/ consumers flock to everything that has spiderman in it.

The miles morales game will be successful I'll give it that it's just not going to the system-seller people are screaming on about. It isn't Mario or Zelda or Pokemon or even Halo.

@Zuljaras I can't decide if the whole external expansion drive thing is more like a giant flashcart of legal AAA games, or if it's more like PSX memory cards for which I still have nightmares about selecting memory card slots for FF saves.

@Octane it's all fine and good until you realize PS5's idiotic storage will cost more....

@DarthNocturnal This is what I'm complaining about with the decisions both console vendors made regarding storage. SSD's are not new tech and are reasonable prices. SATA interface SSD's limted to 6 GB/s which is more than enough. But no, that wasn't good enough for Microsoft. They had to go with PCIE NVMe - a custom design more or less NVMe v 3. Bleeding edge, top of the line, designed for performance laptop boot volumes, elite gamers and database servers. Overkill at the top of the price chart for maximum speed. For no reason other than "because it's even fasterer!" with no interface bottleneck like SATA.

Then Sony had to take it up even another level....custom NVMe v3 wasn't good enough. So they sunk the entire budget into a rediculous custom I/O controller and an NVMe v4 implementation. So bleeding edge it doesn't actually exist at retail yet. The HDD costs more than the entire rest of the console to produce, most likely.

So yeah, $220's not fake. It's arguably "cheap." NORMAL SATA SSD drives don't cost $0.22 per GB. But these companies didn't want normal SSDs. They wanted the very best money can buy at any price....

Now, one clarification on SSD to put it in slightly less scathing perspective is that not all SSDs are equal. There's MLC, SLC, (ok for chasing waterfalls), TLC (not ok for chasing waterfalls.) and newer ones that are, we'll say "very consumer" and cheap. Ones with battery backup, ones with capacitor backup, ones with no backup. You can buy cheap "SSD"s that are only somewhat more reliable than spinning HDDs, are pretty fast on reads, but are terrible on writes, in some cases worse than spinning HDDs. Some aren't much better at reads, but are much better on random access (meaning spinners only work best with sequentailly reading things because at the end of the day they work like vinyl record players reading a spiral groove, SSD works like memory, it just reads a specific piece of data anywhere.)

The point is, MLC and SLC cost FAR more, even the "cheap" SATA drives, than the really cheap looking consumer stuff, but if you're doing heavy writes to the drive (a console does) a lot of rewrites to the drive (a console does) etc. you can't really get away with the cheap stuff. The ones with backups are important for servers and workstations because a power failure during a write could corrupt the whole drive, otherwise. For a consumer "your HDD crashed", but for a server.....you're in trouble.

So to put it in perspective I'm used to paying $200-400 for 1 or 1.5TB of SSD storage even with "cheap" SATA....more expensive than the custom xbox solution here. Why? Because it's for professional use where I need huge reads, huge writes, I need them often, I need them fast, and I need them battery protected because if something happens to the drive, I'm down for days, and my life flashes before my eyes.

But I'm not moronic enough to spend that money on storage for video games...... so I still criticize MS/Sony's choice here. It makes N64 cartridges look cheap. Zelda's only $80? PFFT, CoD is $70 + another $15 in storage!

@Justifier Nuh uh, Mark Cerny said 850GB was more than enough for PS5 gamers....

@MsJubilee I just don't think you can compare those 1-to-1. One is a live action film, and part of the whole MCU, and the other is a stylised animated film. The former was always going to do a lot better.

@Ralizah You know that I appreciate you but... That just doesn't make any sense, the Xbox One strategy was not targeting the casual gaming market (I have no idea where you got that from) but an unknown market that would be excited to have a camera watching them in the living room with 24/7 DRM control and that just couldn't wait to buy an expensive console to connect a STB to it instead of to the TV. I'm a huge Rare fan and I considered buying an Xbox 360 instead of an Xbox One. In 2013 and wanting Killer Instinct. That tells you everything about how was marketed Xbox One.

The buzz of the online gamers, no matter if they are Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft, is less than 1% of the console crowd. Honestly, it doesn't mean anything. It's like pre-orders or first month sales. Don't mean anything, fortunately. Remember, PS4 destroyed Xbox One and Wii U because of the casual crowd, not because of Sony fans and Sony's PS4 exclusives that did not even exist. Vita and PS3 should remind you that because Vita failed and, as @NEStalgia reminds you, PS3 performed and sold worse than Xbox 360 and people's engagement and third-party support was lower in spite of Sony selling additional PS3 cheap units when the competition had already discontinued the console you are comparing it to, because Sony knew PS4 would never be backwards compatible and they just wanted to break another record for the marketing spin while Microsoft was dedicated to backwards compatibility and subscriptions and didn't care about console numbers.

@Dezzy @NEStalgia

Regarding Xbox One X enhancements on Series S and X,

We know that Series S is able to output at 4K because it's able to upscale to 4K. The memory difference between Xbox One X and Series S could challenge the Xbox One X enhancements on Series S but the Velocity Architecture and GDDR6 improvements of Series S could make up for it. Digital Foundry speculate about it but only Microsoft knows so I'm going to wait for official confirmation.

For reference:

Xbox One X: 12GB of GDDR5 RAM, with 9GB running at 326GB/s primarily to be used with the graphics system and the other 3GB also at 326GB/s to be used for the other computing functions.

Series X: 16GB of GDDR6 SDRAM, with 10GB running at 560GB/s primarily to be used with the graphics system and the other 6GB at 336GB/s to be used for the other computing functions.

Series S: 10GB of RAM of GDDR6 SDRAM, with 8GB at 224GB/s primarily to be used with the graphics system and the other 2GB at 56GB/s to be used for the other computing functions.

Also, it's worth remembering this:

Microsoft confirmed to Digital Foundry that Xbox Series X supports compatibility at the hardware level, a big step up from software emulation currently being used on Xbox One.

This allows older games to utilise Xbox Series X’s full potential, making use of 100% of its powerful CPU and GPU. By comparison, Xbox One X’s performance was throttled to just 50% of its actual power when running Xbox 360 and original Xbox games.

@NEStalgia They didn't really have a choice, otherwise features such as Quick Resume and Intelligent Delivery probably wouldn't work properly.

How do Series S compare to Series X according to Jason Ronald from Microsoft and third-party developer Gavin Stevens?

Stevens explains that the Series S has a slight drop in CPU performance but "likely won’t even use most of its power, as maxing out all 8 cores at full speed is a rarity." He also points out that despite what some are saying online, the GPU in the system "eats the past-gen Xbox One X alive, and it really is no contest."

He goes on to suggest that if any concerns crop up for developers, it will be in the smaller and slower RAM in the Xbox Series S (although the drop in resolution will also mean a "massive drop in VRAM utilisation"), and also mentions that unlike making a next-gen game and porting to the current-gen Xbox One X, the Xbox Series S is built so similarly to the Xbox Series X that it can be "as easy as dropping the res and a few quality settings."

So as a final answer to the question, is the Series S going to hold back game design or graphics for ANY next gen system? No, not in the slightest. Jason Ronald from Xbox already said it best: 'games are made for Xbox Series X, then scaled down resolution to Xbox Series S'.

HDR implementation on Series X/S

In partnership with the Xbox Advanced Technology Group, Xbox Series X delivers a new, innovative HDR reconstruction technique which enables the platform to automatically add HDR support to games. As this technique is handled by the platform itself, it allows us to enable HDR with zero impact to the game’s performance and we can also apply it to Xbox 360 and original Xbox titles developed almost 20 years ago, well before the existence of HDR.

They even used a thermographic camera to demonstrate this HDR solution that is not pseudo but real.

@BlueOcean " the Xbox One strategy was not targeting the casual gaming market (I have no idea where you got that from) but an unknown market that would be excited to have a camera watching them in the living room with 24/7 DRM control and that just couldn't wait to buy an expensive console to connect a STB to it instead of to the TV. "

I LOLed so hard at that. It's both savage, and true....

I know I said this a few times here, but that E3 day I went into it prepared to buy either console. It was anyone's show to impress me. I owned a PS3 and 360, more than one of each. I liked both. I wanted to like Playstation more - I like the Japanese-ness and generally dislike associating evil Microsoft and the feeling of the business & enterprise grind interfering with play time, but generally preferred the 360 more due to the controller and the fact that PS3 ran anything not made by Sony like utter garbage. But I spent the whole XBox presentation agape and aghast. And when sony came on with the traditional discs and price I preordered in minutes and laughed at XBox as a meme right up until S/X were announced and they turned around. I was certain the XBone would be their last console....and it almost was if Phil hadn't talked his way out of closure when given the chance.

It was marketed toward casual, though. That was the intention. But it was a very, very, very misguided understanding of that market that thought that slick "future tech" (an Ingsoc Telescreen?) and a high price had any chance at all of success in that market. Mattricks' problem wasn't that he ignored gamers. He wasn't really targeting gamers even slightly, and that's fine. It's that he didn't understand, at all, the market he was supposedly aiming for. He got lost chasing Wii with ever more expensive tech while not grasping at all what made Wii popular to begin with. And he doubled down on the assumption that the entire causual market consists of a hybrid Cleveland/Liverpool way of life. And he did it all with a colossal arrogance that assumed his idea of the connected IoT was the immediate future, and nothing could stop it, and everyone wanted it. I truly think he believed he would change the game console to not be about gaming, but a connected entertainment hub where you can interact with all media all on a single device (thus the name XBox One, reflecting that one device for everything strategy, and the original slogan of "XBox One - All in One" that never made it out of E3.)

This idea that a TV tethered video game console would become the standard household connected interface to all media also explains Microsofts continued colossal failure to make any inroads at all in mobile devices..... Surface is the best portable device ever made that isn't a smartphone. So what do they do? Surface Duo. "It's like a worse smartphone, but without a phone, shaped like a 3DS!" They still don't understand why people like Surface..........

I think if Mattrick's idea of XBox came in at $350, no spy cam, and didn't try to take away used games in 2013, it would have been a runaway success, Playstation would have been on their back heel, still headquartered in Japan, and we'd probably all be on Pushsquare right now laughing at XBox dudebros and their sports games not being "real gamers."

But it backfired because Mattrick got all the details wrong, PS got handed the casual market on a silver platter, and after almost collapsing, XBox came back as a box focused on the core gamer more than PS, while PS remains essential for weeb gaming. And now we're stuck buying both of them.

I don't think Sony sold cheap PS3's to break records just for marketing spin. I think they sold cheap PS3s so they could sell additional copies of their first party games that languished by Sony standards on the undersold PS3, like selling WiiU ports on Switch, and they knew they'd virtually never support those games on x86 hardware (2 gens later, still no PS3 games.) They just took advantage of the spin that offered to have something to tout and hardcore Sony fans took that and ran with it as a cinderella story for some misguided reason. They knew XBox fans were converting to PS in droves after the One went down, and they needed to have a way to get the back catalogue to those new fans. PSNow was the original idea, but that.......didn't quite work..... So selling their new fans a whole second piece of hardware for cheap was the only viable means. Unusually for Sony, but I don't think they were really milking it for money. I think they honestly just had no other practical means of delivering their back catalogue because they blew the PS3 in every way imaginable. So instead of BC, they just had to sell cheap old hardware. I wouldn't doubt they actually lost money on those things just to sell the games. Cell CPUs were never going to be cheap to produce, no matter the die shrink. The thing was a fudging disaster, pure hubris cast into silicone, from start to finish that leaves them with a permanent 7 year gap in back catalogue sales.

But even as a fellow PS fan it's cringe-inducing anytime I hear anyone drag out the "PS3 clawed its way back to the top!" meme. I can hear the snirking in the board room every time someone says that from here.

The thing was a ridiculously expensive failure that took three total redesigns, one before launch (It was supposed to have 2 Cells, one for CPU, one for GPU.....after they could not make it work at all they had to, at the last minute, rip out the GPU Cell and buy that lame off the shelf nVidia solution), 2 after launch (the 400GB that ripped out half the secondary features including BC, and finally the slim that actually brought it to the market), just to actually get established on the market and still finished the gen woefully behind before the after the fact sales caught it up..... Just let poor PS3 rest in peace, stop trying to pretend it was somehow a success story, and be grateful Microsoft and Nintendo collaborated on making sure PS4 was a resounding return to form, and that in turn made Microsoft double down on deep gamer value! Even Sony keeps trying to dig the hole deeper so people just forget about it.... One was a failure of marketing, bundling, pricing, and policy. WiiU was a failure of being the wrong product for the wrong audience at the wrong time. PS3 was just a failure on every angle but happened to have some great games. Vita.....I don't know...did it even fail? They just pretended it didn't exist right after they launched it.....I don't know if it had time to fail or not. Vita shares the dunce chair with Virtual Boy as a product the company that made it didn't actually want to sell at all.

@BlueOcean Looking at the graphics memory difference, I'm surprised the S has such slow memory. That's probably the bottleneck on textures right there. My hunch is that at that speed it's loading 1080p asset textures but rendering at 1440p, not loading the 4k texture packs. That could also help with file sizes, keeping XSeS games smaller on the smaller HDD by only needing half the texture data the XSeX/1X uses. With that, I imagine they can keep game sizes 20-30% smaller on the SeS than SeX - a big plus for the smaller HD, and with 1440p rendering, the 1080p textures will still look great and still benefit from supersampling to 1080p screens.

I'm also going to take a wild guess and say most games are not going to render at 1440p, but at 1080p (kind of like how few Switch games actually render at 1080p despite that the system can and does do it.) Two reasons: A, the texture packs are probably all 1080p textures packs (vs 4k texture packs for SeX/1X), and B: Scaling to 4k usually yields superior results from 1080p than 1440p. Nobody's using 1440p on their display unless they're playing on a performance (fps) oriented gaming monitor. So most displays are going to be 1080p or 2160p (4k.) The ideal for the machine is to render at 1080p. It's native for 1080p displays, and for 4k displays it can just pixel double to 4k. Boom, done. (And kind of irrelevant, since most scalers inside the display can do that just fine as well.....) Alternately it might render at 720p often and triple that to 4k.....messier than pixel doubling though. Odd pixels never quite work out great.

It's all a guess, then, but my assumption from this is that XSeS is really a 1080p machine. With 1080p textures only. But can render higher as desired for supersampling or for gaming monitors. That keeps the GPU and memory constraints well within check, lets them market 1440 even though it's rendering FHD games at higher target resolutions, and keeps the SSD size in perspective more (the games themselves can be much smaller to install, though certainly not half the size of the SeX version.)

Still not a bad deal by any stretch. Most people have 1080p displays, so going higher isn't much benefit short of those of use into Forza Grass and Forza Trees. And with pixel doubling it's not really going to look much worse on a 4k display......even my Switch looks fantastic on my 4k display with zero "blurring" you'd associate with scaling because it's even multiples. It doesn't really lose any sharpness it just has less potential detail than full 4k assets.

@Grumblevolcano SSD differences are just the total speed, sustained speeds, random access reads/writes, etc. If it takes 300ms to load on an nvme and 400-900ms to load on SATA, how does that break anything short of broken software? Quick resume resumes slightly, perceptibly less quickly than with the top speed option. It gives them a marketing bullet that mega SSD quick resume is even faster than non-mega SSD resume, but both are fast, but not much more than that. I don't see how intelligent delivery is impacted. Not many gamers are plugged into 10gbT internet connections so download speeds can saturate the PCI bus..... Not many servers are, either....

EDIT: Also, the PS3 story kind of shows how little that Playstation brand power really tends to matter on a mass market scale for a generational shift. Nobody has ever had more brand power going into a generation than Sony post-PS2, or Nintendo after Wii/DS. Yet both miserably failed to gain traction on their next generation. One could say the same about MS and One, but they never built that brand power than PS2, Wii, DS, and to a degree, PS4 did. The right offer, not the right brand legacy seems to matter most.

I can live with a 500GB hard drive, I just want them to have a way of showing all of the games I OWN on a menu, and then maybe have a little "redownload" button next to the ones that aren't on the hard drive at present.
I assume that doesn't already exist and I've just missed it?

@Dezzy So, basically, it should work like Switch....

I can't recall if there's a menu on the interface that shows installed and not installed games together on X1....I can't imagine there isn't, but I don't think I've ever used it. I usually just want to see what's not downloaded so I can download it, or see the "full" list, which is downloaded. But I bet there's already a menu on X1 that does what you want. Switch and PS4 both do.

@NEStalgia Thanks, your reply to the PS3 discussion is absolutely brilliant 😊.

I agree, I think that Series S will use HD texture packs, thus doesn't need much RAM and storage. They had mentioned previously that Series X doesn't include a massive amount of memory because memory is used more efficiently on the next-gen consoles. Series S renders at 1080p/1440p and it's able to upscale to 4K so, even with HD textures, is going to look good on 4K TVs. I'm interested in Series X although I'm not going to use the disc drive much but I see the best value in Series S.

@NEStalgia

Does the Switch do that? How?

@Dezzy For Switch, I don't know if it shows you games that you bought but never downloaded. Anything you never downloaded at all I think you have to go into the redownload page of the eShop, but any game you've downloaded at least once, instead of selecting delete, press + and select to archive it. It deletes the game but leaves the icon in your library with the cloud download icon over it.

Edit: For PS4 one of the tabs on the "all games" page or whatever the name is is one that shows all games, purchased and downloaded, together. For X1, I'm not positive there's a similar page or not. Surprising if not, but you can also just toggle between the two tabs with the bumpers that shows your downloaded and not downloaded ones, so it's all still in the same interface.

Microsoft has just confirmed that Series S will run the Xbox One S version of the backwards compatible games. However, they will be presented with improved texture filtering, higher and more consistent frame rates, faster load times and Auto HDR.

Still, more than what Nintendo offers in their full-priced "remasters" 🤣.

@BlueOcean

Where have they commented on it?

@Dezzy https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/xbox-series-s-likely...