Since launch, Xbox Series S owners have been able to have a good experience; but clearly limited in its graphics section when compared to its big sister Xbox Series X. The former certainly doesn’t have all the power of the last generation. Nonetheless, updating your dev kit seems to make a bit of a difference.
According to a video posted by Microsoft itself, an update to the Xbox Series S Development Kit will increase performance (frames per second) in some games. It appears that the company has provided developers with “hundreds of extra megabytes” to adapt their games. According to them, this “gives developers more control over memory, allowing for better graphics performance in memory-constrained environments.”
The issue of memory limits on the Xbox Series S is well documented. Actually the middle Digital Foundry noted that this was one of the most painful sections for developers. In addition to limitations in computing or graphics power, limitations in managing memory usage may later lead to a drop in Xbox Series S game development.. It could even lead companies to create custom games for the console, which is completely impractical.
Another improvement published by Microsoft has to do with in-memory graphics processing. As described, they fixed an issue that caused “graphical virtual addresses to be allocated significantly slower than non-graphical virtual addresses”. A) Yes, titles can better take advantage of improvements what the company has done to achieve better performance without affecting the graphic part.
An Uncertain Future for Xbox Series S
The truth is that while Microsoft’s initiative is welcome, the Xbox Series S is still quite limited in some respects. In fact, unlike the 16GB Series X, the $299 version only has 10 GB of RAM. While Microsoft hoped this would result in games offering a maximum of 1440p and 120fps, the reality is that most games run optimally at 1080p.
But that’s not all. Developers can’t even use all 10 GB to create their games. After all, 2 GB reserved for console systemleaving only 8 GB free to run games.
With how fast the graphics part is developing in this generation, those 8 GB will soon become obsolete. However, if the Xbox 360 was able to end its career as one of the most popular consoles with just 512MB of RAM, things might not be so bad for the Xbox Series S.
Source: Hiper Textual
