Xbox Series S and X Thread - Backwards Compatible like no other

[Necrokiller]

We don't know much about the SSD either though. PCIe Gen 3 standard has upto 3.5GB/s sequential reads and the latest SSDs based on Gen4 are already available in the market, with sequential reads upto 5GB/s. 1TB of Gen4 SSD sets you back $200+ today. This is likely what the consoles will be based on and the caching technology and memory controller will be important in determining performance. Games will only get bigger, install sizes and patches will increase. For peak SSD performance, you don't want the space to be filled up close to its max capacity.

 

[Chandoo]

The thing is, unlike most conventional PC's, when these next-gen consoles start shipping with new-fangled SSD's out of the box .. with 100% SSD availability it will also allow developers to make games with this in mind. There's no consideration for the need to factor in slower mechanical drives at all.

That will be interesting.

 

[Necrokiller]

Maybe we will finally see a SpiderMan game which isn't a loading screen galore. But then Arkham Knight didn't have any loading on current gen mechanical drives interestingly.

 

[manigamer]

Maybe we will finally see a SpiderMan game which isn't a loading screen galore. But then Arkham Knight didn't have any loading on current gen mechanical drives interestingly.

It's batman after all.

 

[Chandoo]

Maybe we will finally see a SpiderMan game which isn't a loading screen galore. But then Arkham Knight didn't have any loading on current gen mechanical drives interestingly.

SM only loads going from outdoor to indoors, and the indoor areas in SM were far more intricate than anything in Arkham Knight

 

[Necrokiller]

SM only loads going from outdoor to indoors, and the indoor areas in SM were far more intricate than anything in Arkham Knight

Hahahah fuck no to the bolder part. But either way SpiderMan reaches Bloodborne levels of load screens so the only thing holding it back was its engine not mechanical hard drives.

 

[CerebralTiger]

The thing is, unlike most conventional PC's, when these next-gen consoles start shipping with new-fangled SSD's out of the box .. with 100% SSD availability it will also allow developers to make games with this in mind. There's no consideration for the need to factor in slower mechanical drives at all.

That will be interesting.

Yeah, asset streaming will get a big boost and you'll see games with faster traversal. I recall someone from Insomniac saying that they wanted the web swinging to be faster but had to slow it down to accommodate the speed at which assets would adequately load into the scene.

GTA3 on the PS2 was a mess in this regard, as it streamed data off the disc. The PS2's disc drive just didn't have the read speed for that kind of thing.

 

[manigamer]

SM only loads going from outdoor to indoors, and the indoor areas in SM were far more intricate than anything in Arkham Knight

are you kidding me ? indoors of batman were whaaat. dude... "facepalm"

 

[Chandoo]

 

[JANARIOO]

lick the big chip "Lick it" intensifies

 

[manigamer]

[h=1]Microsoft promises Xbox Series X games will also play on Xbox One — for now[/h]

The Xbox ecosystem will work ‘sort of like PC,’ exec says


[FONT=&quot]

[/FONT][FONT=&quot]A



The next console generation begins this holiday season, with Microsoft and Sony launching new hardware in the form of the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, respectively. But this time around, since both consoles will offer full backward compatibility with current-generation games, that doesn’t mean leaving the past behind. Microsoft is going one step further: Its first-party games will be playable across both the Xbox One and Xbox Series X, at least for now, meaning that nothing will be restricted exclusively to the new console.
“As our content comes out over the next year, two years, all of our games, sort of like PC, will play up and down that family of devices,” said Matt Booty, head of Microsoft’s internal development teams at Xbox Game Studios, in an interview with MCV. “We want to make sure that if someone invests in Xbox between now and [Series X] that they feel that they made a good investment and that we’re committed to them with content.”
Microsoft has offered glimpses of two first-party Xbox Series X games, 343 Industries’ Halo Infinite — scheduled to launch alongside the console — and Ninja Theory’s Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2. The company’s marketing is likely to focus on the next-gen versions of both titles, highlighting all the bells and whistles that the Xbox Series X will enable, such as photorealistic graphics with real-time ray tracing.


Cross-generation compatibility is great news for the tens of millions of Xbox One owners out there, since they won’t have to buy an Xbox Series X to play the new Halo game. But there’s also a potential downside. Across both generations, the full Xbox “family of devices,” as Booty put it, runs the gamut from the launch Xbox One all the way up to the Xbox Series X. In an interview with GameSpot, Xbox head Phil Spencer said that the Xbox Series X offers “over eight times the GPU power of the Xbox One.”
If first-party developers have to design a game that can be played on such a wide range of hardware, is there a risk that their ambition will be hampered by a scope that’s limited to the capabilities of the Xbox One? Could they do more if they weren’t restricted by the constraints of supporting what will be a 7-year-old console by the time the Xbox Series X launches, and were able to focus solely on next-gen hardware? (Microsoft has yet to comment on numerous reports of a second next-generation model, but the long-rumored console, codenamed “Lockhart,” is said to be a less powerful version of the Series X.)
Well, for one thing, this isn’t a problem in PC gaming, which is much more of a continuum. All kinds of games that are more than a decade old are still playable on modern systems. And new games are designed to be scalable, so that computers with older components can still handle them. Booty himself pointed to this, saying that the Xbox ecosystem will work “sort of like PC [gaming].”

Microsoft has been laying the groundwork for this setup for years. The company began blurring the lines between Xbox and PC with initiatives like Xbox Play Anywhere and multiple generations of backward compatibility. And with the Xbox One X, it iterated on hardware while maintaining the Xbox One software and services ecosystem. Going with cross-generation games is just taking that philosophy to the next logical step — eliminating the concept of distinct console generations. (Sony, for its part, has been following a similar path, although of course, it doesn’t have a stake in PC gaming like Microsoft does with the Windows operating system. We’ll have to see if Sony also emphasizes cross-gen gaming between the PS4 and PS5.)
To be sure, Booty said that developers of Xbox Series X launch titles will work to show off the power of the console. Halo Infinite developer 343 Industries “is definitely going to be doing things to take advantage” of the new hardware, Booty told MCV. And there’s a long history of cross-gen development at the debut of a console, if only to beef up the launch lineup with enhanced ports in lieu of entirely new exclusives. But a multiyear commitment to maintaining compatibility (and presumably, cross-buy/cross-play/cross-save) between Xbox One and Xbox Series X — that’s a new paradigm that could change how we think of console gaming forever.
[/FONT]

 

[iampasha]

Every time the word PC gaming is mentioned in an Xbox post a Xbox user dies a bit inside

CRAWLING in my SKINN

Sent from Mobile

 

[CerebralTiger]

That just means cross-gen Xbox first-party games will be held back by Jaguar CPUs, smaller memory pool, and the lack of an SSD. Most multiplatform games will also be cross-gen for the first year or two. There will be some exceptions, however, such as Bethesda's Starfield. Something supposedly as ambitious as Star Citizen simply can't be made to run on PS4/Xbox One without major design-related compromises.

PS5 exclusives won't be playable on PS4, and that's a good thing. Sony is clearly interested in migrating its PS4 player base over to PS5. The more appealing its exclusives, the sooner it'll happen.

 

[Chandoo]

 

[iampasha]

Also AMD's card terraflops are always higher than equivalent Nvidias competing card. Always knew terraflops doesn't show the whole picture. That being said, I'm surprised how good the 750 ti held over time. I was expecting a complete thrashing in modern games.



Sent from Mobile

 

[CerebralTiger]

Also AMD's card terraflops are always higher than equivalent Nvidias competing card.

True, though AMD RDNA architecture TFLOPs are closer to Nvidia's.

 

[Chandoo]

With PS4 churning out games like TLoU 2, God of War etc which arguably look better than any output on the much more powerful XBX, it's safe to say the talent behind the terraflops is equally important.

 

[CerebralTiger]

Richard Leadbetter | In Theory: Can Microsoft deliver next-gen experiences while still supporting Xbox One?

It's a question only the developers can answer but supporting last-gen machines must surely limit options - and that effectively sums up the principal concern I have with Microsoft's strategy here. Additionally, we can't avoid the fact that the Xbox One S has sometimes struggled to deliver decent versions of current-gen games across the course of 2019, so just how is it going to cope with next-gen titles?

Ultimately, I have three questions outstanding. First of all, what will be missed by not having new Xbox games exclusively written for the capabilities of Series X? If PlayStation 5 has true exclusives, we should find out when the time is right. Secondly, assuming the cheaper four teraflop Navi-based Lockhart box is real and still coming, how will Halo Infinite on a prospective 'Series S' compare with the Xbox One X build? This may highlight just how potent the CPU and SSD truly are if GPU performance is broadly equivalent. And finally, just how much will developers need to cut back to get games designed primarily for next-gen running on Xbox One S?

On the final point, perhaps we'll get some kind of idea of what's possible sooner rather than later. We've seen Cyberpunk 2077 played in real-time on powerful GTX and RTX graphics cards paired with high-end Intel CPUs. It's a game that pushes boundaries in all directions and try as we might, it's difficult to imagine an equivalent experience running on the vanilla Xbox One S and PlayStation 4. However, the game will ship on those consoles just a few short months from now. As an indication of how third party developers will handle the upcoming cross-gen period, this may well be as good as it gets.

Cyberpunk 2077 base Xbox One version confirmed? lol

 

[Necrokiller]

Games like Arkham Knight are already next-gen as far as talents like Insomniac are concerned :hah:

 

[Chandoo]

I knew about 120hz but didn't know current gen Xbox's also support VRR. I don't think a single game supports it there, however.