Xbox Series S Under Fire As Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 Tech Specs Revealed

What's worth mentioning as well is the smaller the RAM pool size isn't the only difference in RAM.
The Series S's RAM is significantly slower across the board as well.

Series X- 16GB total
10GB at 560 GB/s
6GB at 360 GB/s

Series S- 10GB total
8GB at 224 GB/s
2GB at 56 GB/s.

Series S has 60% slower high speed RAM.
Series S has 84% slower low speed RAM.

It’s hard to say who exactly is to “blame” here, if indeed that’s the right word. Is it Microsoft for demanding parity between X/S, or Warhorse studios for not optimising the game better? Either way it’s not good for a game’s potential when it’s being held back by one of the consoles, an argument which can also be levelled at publishers still releasing games on last-gen consoles.

I pointed this out in the comments of the push Square article but the studio, just a month and a half ago, said it was a full 100% bigger than the original.

IGN headline

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 Announced, Will be 'Twice as Big' as the Original: ‘A Behemoth of a Game’

https://www.ign.com/articles/kingdom-come-deliverance-2-xbox-ps5-pc-warhorse-studios

@BacklogBrad The comment section over at Push Square is toxic asf and it doesn't help that the website encourages console wars by making these articles.

So the game currently runs at a maximum of 4K 30fps on the X/PS5 so if they had done double the map would it be have been 4K 15fps or perhaps 480p 30? It just seems they aren't as talented as they think they are 😐

So we can all expect a flawless 60fps on the Series X since the game is so much smaller due to the Series S, right, right?

The second game will output at 4K / 30FPS on Xbox Series X

Never mind, just another developer who wants to keep his game a hot topic by bashing the Series S in the process 😅.

The first game and The Witcher 3 are on Switch...

Look, not the weakest system is what limits a game during development. You can ALWAYS downscale something to make it run on a weaker system.

Also, GTA V was on Xbox 360 (which is still a miracle to me, how well it ran on 2004 hardware).

@UltraGuy yeah I found an older push square article from the same author around the same time as the IGN article that cited the same twice as big quote. Either he forgot about it or deliberately left it out to maintain the hit piece narrative. I wouldn't expect him to remember every quote he cites but also wouldnt put it past someone to leave it out.

@BacklogBrad Yeah I remember reading somewhere else that the interview from which the 25% claim was taken was not translated very well, and that this claim was therefore inaccurate. I was going to politely bring that up in the same Push Square article that you are referring to, buuuuuut I wasn't so sure if that would go over well with our friends over there haha

Are we going to hear about how the PS5 is holding back the PS Pro once it's launched ?

@InterceptorAlpha i completely forgot that the RAM in Series consoles isn’t unified. So what is the reason again for this technical decision? Why not just make it one big pool of 10 GB memory running at 224 GBps and let developers take advantage of that the way they see fit?

@Sifi

Absolutely, but that'll be discussed only in high level, top secret meetings and the only public person to know about it will be Jim Ryan 🤣..

@Widey85 On Kingdom Come the Switch struggles at 720p when docked and drops all the way to 540p when in handheld. All the while regularly dropping to frame rates in the 10s when anything aside from walking through a field is occurring.

And, yea, Hogwarts Legacy works on Switch. At the cost of one of the biggest features, a seamless, open, world. Instead the Switch version is a collection of areas you have the load through each time.

I would only ever advise someone that only has a Switch to get it there. Because it is a pretty awful port.

They simply get passes because they're on the Switch and nobody expects it to be able to run things reasonable. Myself included.

I have to say as a massive fan of the OG XBox game "Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders," this headline made me do a double take and I'm disappointed.

Digital Foundry saw the Series S long before it was announced to the public and their immediate reaction was that the RAM would be an issue, and here we are.

No 60fps performance on series x.
NO BUY, simple as that.

More to the point and issue where is the Series x and PS5 60fps performance mode.
Lame.

@Jenkinss You're not the only one. Absolutely ate that game up back in the day.

@endlessleep My best guess was cost saving measures. Slower RAM is cheaper, especially when you think in bulk.

So provide enough fast RAM for things that actuary need it, like the GPU. Then save a few bucks by using slower RAM to fill out the pool for expected slower processes.

no 60 no buy. nope.

Yet...another article about Series S issues.

Gee...say it isn't so. No. Not the Series S. No way.

@InterceptorAlpha i guess developing $299 next-gen console at that time is very hard because imo the cut on XSS wasn't very thoughtful. Yet with all the cut it had, Microsoft still sold them at a loss.

Still, my ideal of XSS specs would be One X with architectural upgrades and that means 6TF RDNA2 gpu and 12GB GDDR6 224GBps memory. That imo would help so much and XSS won't have to lose out on 60fps mode XSX/PS5 game version usually had.

@BacklogBrad The PS article from this morning actually does reference the map size being twice as big in the article so it's not something that the writer has forgotten about. However, crucially the article also says they only increased the scope by 25% and not the size, which are two different things. It's a poor translation so we don't really know for sure but it's likely that the comments weren't relating specifically to the map size and may have been referring to something else.

Think this is more blame game than anything easy scapegoat!

@Widey85 You mentioned running. If either of the mentioned games launched on Playstation or Xbox it would have been dragged through the mud.

The Switch builds are totally different builds. Like how back in the day the N64 version of a game and PS1 vediaon of a game, were totally different despite sharing the same name.

The Series S coykd easily be holding back a traditional build. Especially since we know of Microsoft's parity requirements that they only waive in very specific situations.

Funny you should mention the PS5. Why would anyone need to optimize for it? It is the lead platform on any hardware intense game. The PS5 has a unified memory pool at 16GB running 480GB/s. Oodles faster than the Series S. Though a bit slower than the Series X's fastest.

Not having to manage different pools in itself is an advantage. That combined with the larger install base on Playstation results it in being the defacto lead platform for development. So anything in excess of what Playstation offers generally just smooths things out a bit.

Must be mistranslated for one Series S has 60% more RAM than previous Gen not 25% (Xbox1/Ps4 had 5GB usable by devs vs Series S 8GB)

@Kevw2006 it would be interesting to assign a percentage to an unquantifiable measure like that. But the IGN article does quote them as saying "much bigger in scope" and a story that is "much more epic."

If Witcher 3 can run on the Switch and somebody can program bacteria to display Doom then the barrier isn’t the Series S; it’s the ingenuity of programmers.

The PC market is great but being able to pass the spec ceiling costs onto gamers has made developers lazy. What happened to the stories of devs reusing raw code to create static and save a few Kb of RAM or the Ocarina of Time sky cube illusion?

RadioHedgeFund - you really shouldn't be blaming the developers. It's not the developers who choose what does/doesn't get done - it's product management. Most developers want to do a good job but we get told where to put the time/effort in and trust me features/shiny win over stability/performance/bugs every time. (I'm a non game software dev)

@Sifi absolute joke to me that years into an essentially lost generation with PS4 games still coming out, Sony are releasing a 5 Pro. Not done an awful lot with the original and now asking saps to cough up again. To play Concorde? Joke.

And yet a game like Red Dead Redemption 2 runs on an XB1S and you don't get much 'bigger' than Starfield or even MSFS for example....

i will never understand why devs don't just deload assets not in use. if i'm on one side of a map and i can't even see it then deload it. we're on extremely fast storage mediums, stream and deload data as needed. why are devs still treating memory like its reading from a disc still.

I'm glad that more consumers are not ok with 30fps. The "cinematic" excuse was bullcrap back then, and it's even more ridiculous in 2024 when consoles are more powerful.

That’s a good thing. I hate when games get heavily bloated on content 99% of players won’t even bother to enjoy

Series S has less memory because it uses lower resolution textures. It shouldn’t impact “map” size of a game. It’s not like the entire game world is always loaded into memory. You can’t even fit the first game’s world into 16GB. Seems like we’re missing some info, cause it seems like trying to grow apples on an orange tree.

@cardcrusher29 consoles aren’t powerful enough to keep up with the ridiculous “realistic” graphics people demand, and do both 4K and 60fps… 4K was way too ambitious for game consoles. Games and budgets and dev time and spec needs are bloated.

Every time I see an article about how the 'Series S' is inadequate, I have to point out that it's all buzzwords and relying on the consumer not being a big tech nut.

Yes, if the Series S was expected to output some games at 4K, it would have issues, but the games are almost all optimized to run at much lower resolutions and still output at the same frame rate.
There's very few games with noticeable load times once you get into the game, and the only reason that the Series S's RAM would affect world size is if you load the entire map in one go.

Massive open world games can literally have you traverse the entire map and not spot the loading zones the same way as on PS3 and XBOX 360 or PS4 and XBOX One.
And almost none of them go 'Our game has impaired performance since the Series S exists'.

@jesse_dylan
I'm aware that the 4080 and its AMD equivalent have problems running the newest demanding games at 4k even when ray tracing is not factored in. I also agree that native 4k is not realistic with current gen consoles. However, the PS5 and XSX are powerful enough to run games at 60fps. Look at Forza Horizon 4-5, Redfall, Starfield, and the Spider Man games on PSN. The 60fps on console can be achieved at lower resolutions on some games.

Lmao, thought the argument was going to be around the specifications impacting performance, but seems people are stressing on the game size being the impact? I'm pretty sure the size of a game has nothing to do with it, but quite funny that some people have found an arbitrary correlation that likely isn't the reason. A sequel game being 25% bigger isn't out of the ordinary and is quite reasonable anyway.