Topic: General Xbox Series X|S Thread

Does anyone believe this leak?

What’s the point of upgrading a “next-gen console” over a better PC or the current mid-gen console when we are still stuck with deciding between either 4K@30 or 60fps at low res and likely less effects? Will the so-called “face of gaming” a.k.a Geoff Keighley still consider this as “next-gen”?
https://kotaku.com/ratchet-clank-rift-apart-will-have-a-60-fp...

@Z3u5000 Do you own a gaming PC or any PC that you could upgrade? If you want to build your own, a Zen 2 3700X CPU (8 core/16 thread 3.6Ghz) costs £300, a Radeon 5700XT GPU (RDNA 1.0, 40 CU 1670Mhz 8.5TF) costs around £400 and doesn't have hardware accelerated RT - And GTX 2070+ will cost £500+

To get a PC to do 4k/60fps you have to spend quite a lot - a High End Gaming PC with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Super and AMD Ryzen 7 3700X with 16GB DDR4 and 1TB SSD, Win 10 will cost ~£1550 and that will struggle to do Native 4k, 60fps RT etc and expect a Console to do that for £500 (or less). I think a LOT of PC owners will be running games on 1440p monitors at most more than pushing Native 4k

A PC at least gives you options to tweak the settings, use DLSS in some games etc to try and get the frame rate at a graphical setting you can accept but it will be a good few years until you can get a PC to 'compete' with these consoles on price and performance.

MS won't really care if you opt to game on PC instead of Series X, as long as you are buying into their ecosystem and you will need a PS5 if you want to play games like R&C. I really don't think the new consoles will cease making games that run at 30fps - not if you want native 4k with all the graphical bells and whistles. At least it seems they may give more choice in the future, much more likely to get 60fps+ modes...

There is a choice for you and you will have to decide what is the right direction for you to go. Xbox is more than just the console so you could play Xbox on PC (or Mobile) if that's the right direction for you.

@BAMozzy I thought we would be leaving the “30fps” era behind with next-gen. We just don’t want a 60fps mode with less effects, we want a full-fledged standard 60fps performance which a similarly spec’d PC can do with next gen GPUs.

The CPU and GPU of PS5 are not just less powerful than Series X but also share a common and capped power pool, if CPU goes higher, the GPU goes lower and vice versa, that's why PS5 can't have next-gen visual at 60 FPS, they have to lower resolution and use less GPU resources so the CPU can run higher and offer a higher frame rate.

I guess this is the first “Captured on Xbox Series X” gameplay. Too bad it’s an indie game.

@Z3u5000 No doubt we will see 'Performance' modes in some games but you can't expect a native 4k with all the visual bells and whistles at 60fps on next gen hardware. It will be possible to upgrade a lot of current gen games to 4k/60 but if devs push what was possible before, then it will be impossible. There are games that struggle to run at a native 4k/60 on PC's without having to turn down settings, rely on Dynamic Resolution scaling (where available) to improve the stability etc. Its why things like DLSS, VRS, Temporal Reconstruction etc have been developed. Going from 30fps to 60fps is a massive drop in available frame-time to render a frame - 33.33ms to 16.7ms

Performance modes will have to sacrifice somewhere and as you can't really scale back too much on the CPU usage, they have to scale down on the visuals. More time available, more time to render and process the image. Its 'cheaper' to render 50-25% less pixels and spend a few ms reconstructing a 4k or using AI to upscale. Everything is determined by Frame Time and rendering and processing a Native 4k image is very expensive. If you want the highest visual quality settings, best draw distances too, you have to give the GPU time to do that - especially with much higher polygon counts and Textures too.

The PS5 has a lot less Shaders too - each Core has 64 shaders and each shader can handle 2 instructions per cycle and if some of those are handling RT, you have less to work with for everything else. They are not 'limitless' despite being a big upgrade over what is currently available and some games will not be current gen just at higher res/frame rates - similar quality shadows, lighting etc, similar polygon counts, similar amount of objects etc....

Also Sony are planning to bring more first party games to PC too so that may well be a reason to consider that platform over a Console. How long you have to wait to play them remains to be seen but if you have the hardware, you may not have to pick between performance or high end visuals...

@BrilliantBill I'm curious about testing some current-gen games on the system. First-party, I'm most excited about Sea of Thieves and Forza Horizon 4 at 60 FPS and also that Gears 5 remaster although I should play the older Gears games first. Third-party, I think that both Assassin's Creed Valhalla and Cyberpunk look great.

@BlueOcean I wanna cry. 😭😍🙏🙌

@Z3u5000 It's September already! 😁

@BlueOcean Since next few months will be all about the most anticipated and delayed title of the decade “Cyberpunk 2077” and maybe the Ubisoft titles, Phil should market and advertise the consoles at full potential with them. Also PC gamers are finally going to get busy with some great stuff in upcoming months.

Xbox Tokyo Game Showcase has been confirmed for September 24. Let’s go!

They should market the fact that Xbox has the best of a console and the best of a gaming PC. I'm tired of ignorant posters and "journalists" that say, "Why would I need an Xbox?". Reality is that you need a 2000-2500 gaming PC to outperform Series X, not to mention the convenience, size, power efficiency, optimisation and backwards compatible games. They are not comparable, even if they play the same games but they don't play the same games anyway.

8K60fps.
Full path tracing no rasterisation 1440p30fps. (seriously can’t tell where the real life ends)
Next-gen is here now.

Xbox Series X already has full hardware features of the upcoming DirectX 12_2.

@BrilliantBill That's right . Even when consoles start to be outdated at the end of the generation, you can wait for the next generation if it's backwards compatible like Series X. There are some current-gen games that I own and that I haven't played yet.

In case you missed part 1...

So I talked about my experience with Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order in another thread and I'm convinced now that I'll be definitely buying a Series X (instead of Series S) just so I can keep buying games 5+ years later and still have a smooth experience on the system. Because the whole PS4 Pro/Xbox One X upgrades have seriously messed up video games for early buyers this generation. Fallen Order, Borderlands 3, Control, there are so many games that have come out recently that just don't run well at all on older consoles. At least during the PS3/360/Wii generation we didn't have to worry about lag in cut scenes when playing games such as Halo 4 and The Last of Us that came out at the end of the generation. Not to mention that buying two of the same systems (e.g. Xbox One and Xbox One X) cost way more than just buying the best one right out of the gate (Series X in this case). I guess there's always the chance that Microsoft will release another upgrade but since they'll be releasing two versions from the start, I get the feeling that they won't do that next generation. But maybe I'm wrong, who knows.

@BrilliantBill It won’t matter, the important bottlenecks are gone now and there’s an eventual limit to human perception.