Nice touch to make the console easier to connect up.
KevinC
2692
I see what you did there.
Any word on peripheral compatibility? Iâm looking at getting kids a racing wheel for xmas, would like it to work on PC as well as upcoming Xbox.
edit: probably a G920 (cheaper since G923 came out) or TMX Pro (canât find non-pro model in stock)
Microsoft has all Xbox One accessories will be compatible with the Xbox Series X, with two exceptions: the Kinect, and optical-based headsets. The latter because the Xbox Series hardware doesnât have an optical out.
The Xbox media remote doesnât work, either, because no IR port.
Ahh, good catch! I felt like I was forgetting one.
Thanks, so I am free to spend all that money - I had hoped wheel prices had come down a bit. :)
The âfastâ memory in the XSX/XSS is designed to be reserved for the GPU. The slow memory is designed to be used by the CPU, OS, etc. My understanding is that itâs still considered a âunifiedâ memory system, but with some added complexities you can frankly Google if you care, lol.
How perfectly this scales down to the 1080p-1440p Series S remains to be seen, and will also depend on how game development evolves over the generation itself. I saw some early anecdotal grumbling from a few devs about whether the 10GB of memory in the XSS will be âenoughâ, although at least a couple of those instances ended with the person admitting they didnât even have a dev kit yet.
Ultimately devs will adapt and overcome, as they always do. Just happy to see a (relatively) inexpensive next-gen console option out there for people, considering the world we live in right now.
JD
2699
Seems like an embargo dropped today with a number of previews popping up.
That Ars review has some weird stuff in it⌠The Xbox will not get dusty because it has a fan - all the dust will be blown out. Its design makes it a vapor chamber.
kerzain
2701
All the vapor gets blown out.
Not sure what thread this goes in
Thatâs a pretty interesting arrangement. At first, I was like, âWhy give up downstream profit to GameStop of all places?â but I forget that a lot of people still primarily do their videogame shopping there.
This gives GameStop obvious incentive to push the Xbox Series, give it more favorable placement, and stock the disc-less version.
I do wonder if other major retailers are going, âHey now, what about us?â
kerzain
2705
Maybe Walmart will back Nintendo and everybody else will back Sony.
Heh, from the Ars article:
When it comes to load times, the Series X version of Gears 5 handily beat out even a high-end PC equipped with an NVMe 3.0 drive (which stored both the Windows OS and the game). After testing a variety of Gears 5 campaign save files, I found a 75 percent improvement for the console version; 53-second loads on my PC were as short as 12 seconds on my Xbox Series X for identical content.
In case you skimmed over that paragraph: Thatâs not comparing Series X load times to older consoles. Thatâs comparing Series X load times to a top-of-the-line PC .
I love this part of the Ars preview:
If youâd like to estimate Microsoftâs confidence in its upcoming Xbox Series X console, start with the fact that the company gave us a console three weeks ago⌠and didnât hang around to see what weâd do with it.
Thatâs not how cutting-edge hardware previews tend to work. There are supposed to be multiday events! And corporate handlers! And finger sandwiches!
Really does show Microsoftâs confidence.
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-10-15-living-with-the-xbox-series-x
For one, this is because the Series X is the least console-feeling console Iâve had, in that everything about it is actively trying to avoid your attention, instead of draw it. Itâs whisper quiet - mid game, with TV on mute, I genuinely couldnât hear it. It didnât once get hot, or even beyond slightly warm.
Thatâs running back compat games, obviously (because, you know, next gen hasnât launched). But a good start.
What does this mean? They think the console speaks for itself, or they know theyâre fucked this gen and are giving up already?
