Despite The Coalition’s Rod Fergusson discussing the benefits of the Xbox One S for Gears of War 4, particularly for reducing frame rate and dynamic resolution penalties during more intense moments, Xbox planning lead Albert Penello says the slimmed down console generally offers next to no benefits in power.
Speaking to Eurogamer, Penello said, “When we made changes to the box for 4K we unlocked a little bit more processing power to enable HDR. That’s it. It’s exactly the same architecture as the existing one.
“To support HDR, we give people access to a little more CPU and GPU. That’s it. It is so insignificant it is mind boggling it is being picked up.”
You won’t notice any performance improvements for games on the Xbox One S and the GPU/CPU have most assuredly not been overclocked. “I promise, it won’t even show up. It will have no impact on games at all. Literally no impact. They will be identical. It’s nothing, it is literally nothing.”
Xbox boss Phil Spencer also noted to Eurogamer that very minor performance changes are a thing with each later also reiterated these comments, saying that changing the innards of a console over the cycle always results in very minor performance changes, so it’s nothing new. “We’ve gone through – even on the existing hardware – multiple hardware iterations on the inside.
“There will be certain decisions that are made either for cost reasons or other supply chain reasons that can result in slightly different performance, whether it’s disc drive throughput… everything’s not always pegged at exactly the same number.”