Update: The below trailer has now been officially released by Microsoft as well, giving up on the whole secrecy side of things after the comprehensive leak of literally everything.
Following on from the overnight leak and subsequent confirmation of the Xbox Series S and its pricing, the full reveal trailer from which this information came from has also been leaked by those same people, detailing more specs of the lower powered next-gen console.
no point holding this back now I guess pic.twitter.com/SgOAjm3BuP
— WalkingCat (@_h0x0d_) September 8, 2020
The Xbox Series S will be priced at $299 / €299 / £249, coming out in November alongside the Xbox Series X – separately, this is expected to be $499 from a parallel leak.
The console will be 60% smaller than the Xbox Series X, and all-digital with no disc drive, which we could already tell from the initial imagery. However, the trailer also tells us what the console can do.
Despite having a much lowered power compared to the Series X – reportedly 4 TFLOPs versus 12 TFLOPs – t will support a resolution of 1440p and 4K game upscaling. That will include ray-tracing support. There will also be support for up to 120FPS and variable refresh rates, as part of the HDMI 2.1 spec, and Microsoft’s pushes for variable rate shading and ultra-low latency gaming.
The console’s storage will be smaller than its bigger brother, at 512GB compared to 1TB, but it’s expected that there will be support for the same plug-in SSDs of that machine, and also external HDD support for Xbox One games and older.
While this is another major PR blunder and leak from Microsoft, it’s to their credit that they simply turned it around into an announcement. Of course, to then have even more details slip between their fingers is a further embarrassment, when the company has been in a tense (and frustratingly boring) standoff with Sony over announcing the release date and price of their respective consoles.
While long speculated, the two-pronged attack on the next generation is now confirmed, with Microsoft targeting both the high end and the lower end of the spectrum. It’s a fascinating approach, with the Series S able to cater to people on a tighter budget, those without 4K TVs, or those thinking about picking up a secondary console to pair with a PS5, PC or something else. Let’s see how it pays off.
Meanwhile, in the land of Sony, a regional GAME store claimed that there was a big PlayStation 5 announcement coming tomorrow…
Source: WalkingCat
colmshan1990
512GB SSD- you may choose one Call of Duty game to install.
Although next gen game install should be smaller, given the increased speed and compression capabilities compared to current gen
Stefan L
Don’t pin your hopes on game sizes shrinking too much. There’s no more duplication, better compression etc. but developers will use everything that they can, given the opportunity. So these improvements will be very quickly countered by developers throwing in more assets, higher resolution textures, etc. etc.
Series S’ 512GB SSD will be filled up very quickly, but the PS5 and Series X will only be a month or two behind. Hopefully all will launch with robust tools to archive next-gen games on an external drive.
gazzagb
It will really come down to what performance is actually achievable when it’s only got about 1/3 of the overall power. I’m guessing 1080/60 and 1440/30?
Stefan L
That’s quite likely, but then it could be matched up against 1440/60 and 2160/30 in a lot of games on PS5 and XSX. It will all depend on the game and what developers are trying to achieve.
gazzagb
Plus, AMD’s DLSS equivalent might be able to help pump up those resolutions without compromising frame rate.
Stefan L
Yeah, it’s nowhere near as refined as DLSS 2.0, but AMD’s sharpening tech is still pretty good. There might be a fresh iteration of it for RDNA 2, though likely not with the same kind of machine learning angle as Nvidia’s solution.
hornet1990
Interesting… does it come in any other colour? Although being white may camouflage it amongst the ikea furniture so that swmbo doesn’t see it ;)