I don’t think there are palette limitations, but many games are running on the Series S at SD with FSR upscaling to 1080P. Quality wise they do look acceptable. See Immportals of Aveum as an example
The S only has 10GB of RAM compared to 16 in the X,
Yes, and the Switch is an ARM based architecture, the 360 was a PowerPC. Architecturally, the S and the X are very similar. Your argument seems to be “The Series S is slower and has less RAM”, which is true, but games should just scale properly. Lower res and lower framerate targets should work. They aren’t working because the game probably doesn’t scale across some critical axis. That’s basically a bug and they should fix it.
I think it bothers people because they think that Series S is “holding back” Series X, which is simply not how it works. Fixing things fixes them everywhere. Series S makes Series X games run faster and better.
The Series S and X are extremely similar hardware wise. Games really just need to scale to fit the two targets. The real issue is that the games and game makers which MS owns largely use a lot more CPU power, which doesn’t really scale down as easily as GPU power. Having a PC game maker act like a console game maker is the real gap in skillset, not the dual targets.
If Rambo The Video Game (2014) was made with the tech of today, it would look much better while costing the devs the same amount of time.
I don’t think this is quite correct. A while back devs were talking about a AAApocalypse. Basically as budgets keep on growing, having a game make its money back is exceedingly hard. This is why today’s games need all sorts of monetisation, are always sequels, have low-risk game mechanics, and ship in half broken states. Regardless of the industry basically abandoning novel game engines to focus on Unreal (which is also a bad thing for other reasons), game production times are increasing, and the reason is that while some of the time is amortised, the greater graphical fidelity makes the lower fidelity work stand out. I believe an “indie” or even AA game could look better today for the same amount of effort than 10 years ago, but not a AAA game.
For example, you could not build Baldur’s Gate 3 in Unreal. This is an unhealthy state for the industry to be in.
Fair point, but we also live in a capitalist system. If Gabe really wanted the money he’d go public. Considering how much they’re giving Epic, Valve would instantly become gigantic. He’d become billionaire-er. He could have locked down the Steam Deck. He could have done a lot of things. I’m saying he’s had a lot of choices he made during his lifetime, and he seemed to pick oddly open ones.
Supply chains are complicated, and MS probably did their due diligence to ensure minimal blockages. From seeing the memory structures of newer video cards, I’m pretty sure there are supply constraints to memory to think of.
Honestly I think gamedevs leaning on memory this hard instead of compute is a mistake. You can have intelligently tiled, procedurally generated textures and have a lot more of them, but instead everyone is leaning on authored content on disc. This goes against industry trends in non-game rendering where procedural generation is the norm. If Doom Eternal can look that good with forward rendering, there are no excuses.
My main beef with the hate on the Series S is that both times it’s been a big deal (BG3 and Halo Infinite), it has been split screen which has held back shipping. The community would be as justified going after split screen as they are going after the Series S.