Xbox Series S has been a topic of debate pretty much since the day Microsoft unveiled it, and even now, more than two years into the current console generation, it generates conversation over whether its lower specs as compared to the Xbox Series X and PS5 are going to put it at a disadvantage down the road. Developers, too, have been part of that debate and have fallen on both ends of the spectrum, while Microsoft itself has, as one might expect, said that the console is very much not going to hold back development.
According to Caverns of Mars: Recharged’s game designer and producer Tadas Migauskas, however, the Xbox Series S is going to struggle as we get deeper into the generation. Speaking in a recent interview with GamingBolt, Migauskas said that owing to its lower computation power and memory, it will be unable to keep up with games’ technical demands as it gets older, and that it’s unlikely to be able to consistently deliver 1440p/60 FPS games the way Microsoft promised at the time of its unveiling it would.
“Short answer – no,” he said. “If we take the (flawed) metric of FLOPS and compare Xbox Series X to Xbox Series S, you get a 3x difference in GPU computation power. Most of the current games use deferred pipelines, so rendered pixel count can translate to computation complexity pretty directly. Now, if we take the expected resolution targets for both consoles, we get a difference of 2.25x. Add that to lower available memory size, and it gets pretty hard to keep up.”
In the same interview, Migauskas also spoke with us about the differences between the PS5 and Xbox Series X’s GPUs, stating that though they’re both powerful pieces of hardware, their differences are likely to become more of a factor in development as the generation progresses. Read more on that through here.
Our full interview with Migauskas will be live soon, so stay tuned for that. Caverns of Mars: Recharged is available now on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC.