The developers behind the Metro series think the smaller next-gen Xbox doesn’t have an issue in long term with the less RAM. Another component is going to cause trouble for them later.

The Xbox Series X has 16 GB GDDR6 (on a 320-bit bus). 10 GB of it runs at 560 GB/s, and 6 GB runs at 336 GB/s. Meanwhile, the Xbox Series S is limited to 10 GB GDDR6 (on a 128-bit bus); 8 GB of it runs at 224 GB/s, and the remaining 2 GB runs at 56 GB/s. The CPU is almost identical in both models, but the Xbox Series X has a 0.2 GHz advantage, plus its GPU has 32 more CUs (compute units). Thus, the Xbox Series S is aiming for 1080p for the most part (in a few cases, it’s 1440p, but we have recently seen Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time going for checkerboard 4K…), and the Xbox Series X’ target is 4K.

WCCFTech interviewed Oleksandr Shyshkovtsov, 4A Games’ chief technical officer, and he thinks that the RAM difference won’t be much of an issue for them. Instead, the GPU difference is what will cause them trouble: „The RAM is not an issue for us (currently), but GPU performance presents challenges for future titles. Our current renderer is designed for high spatial and temporal resolution (read: 4K @ 60 fps). It is stochastic by nature. Dropping any of those would require us to do more expensive calculations dropping performance even further. We have a compromise solution right now, but I am not satisfied with it yet,” Shyshkovtsov said.

4A Games is working on a new Metro game, a Metro multiplayer spin-off, and a brand new IP, and Metro Exodus will get a next-gen upgrade later this year to make the Xbox Series S run it on 1080p, at 60 FPS, featuring full ray-traced lighting, per-pixel ray traced GI, and ray traced emissive surfaces with area shadows.

We’ve seen opposing things from several developers. For example, Fatshark claims the Xbox Series S isn’t going to be much of an issue for them.

Source: WCCFTech