4A Games’ CTO, Oleksandr Shyshkovtsov has expressed his worries about the Xbox Series S as a console extends development time, and makes the developers’ work so much harder.
“The RAM is not an issue for us (currently), but GPU performance presents challenges for future titles,” he said during an interview with Wccfech. “Our current renderer is designed for high spatial and temporal resolution (4K60). It is stochastic by nature. Dropping any of those would require us to do more expensive calculations dropping performance even further. We have a compromise solution right now, but I am not satisfied with it yet.”
Sales of the Xbox Series S have been positive, the Xbox’s decision to beat PlayStation in both, performance and costs could prove to be crucial at closing the gap with PlayStation, however, the hardware of Xbox Series S, and the need of producing cross-gen games might become a hassle, especially after the COVID-19 outbreak.
Oleksandr Shyshkovtsov is not the only developer who has questioned Xbox’s hardware design, id Software’s developers shared their worries before being incorporated into Xbox Game Studios.
Axel Gneiting and Billy Khan criticized the Xbox Series S as the system will require heavy optimizations to run Series X games, something that has led the developers to define the Series S as a console “hard to work with”
Really bummed about this RAM situation on the Series S. This isn’t easy to compensate and drags down base spec quite a bit for next gen multi platform. RAM increase was already small compared to previous gen, now it’s almost non existent. RT BVHs also need a lot of mem on top.
— Axel Gneiting (@axelgneiting) September 10, 2020
“The S is significantly nerfed compared to X ( 4 vs 12.5 TFLOPS / 20 vs 52 CU ) but still much beefier than a base One. It’s a good option for Xbox exclusives if you buy a PS5 and don’t want to buy another expensive console.” Says Dustin Land from id Software.
Remedy’s Senior Technical Producer, Sasan Sepehr affirms that from a customer standpoint, he loves Series S, but as a Technical Producer, he sees trouble.
4A Games recently announced Metro Exodus – Enhanced Edition for Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5. The new edition includes the base game, expansions, and support for both Ray Traced Global Illumination and Ray Traced Emissive Lighting. 4A Games said that Xbox Series S supports the game at 1080p/60 FPS on Xbox Series S, the game will 60 FPS with full Ray Traced lighting.
Source: wccftech via pocket-lint.
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