3234

In case you were curious how fast transfers go from internal SSD to external Seagate SSD expansion card…

3235

Darn. I wanted to try that haha.

3236

That was like a gigabyte a second. Daaaaaamn.

3237

I want one of those expansion cards really bad, but am not willing to pay $220 for it.

3238

Amazing how my interest in the new Xbox plummeted with that revelation.

I mean that says way more about me than anything else but…

3239

That’s the presumption right now. Can easily be reproduced by vaping and blowing smoke under the console. The air circulation pulls the smoke up. But trolls like to get attention.

Can’t even float a feather:

I’m sure we’ll see other claim that the PS5 is the perfect skateboard ramp or something.

3240

So my first ‘Series X optimized’ game to try was Gears 5. Man what a jump from OG Xbox. Obvioulsy there’s the increased resolution, but also the texture detail and HDR lighting etc. all in locked 60fps(not a 120hz TV owner). Still great job by the The Coalition.

3241
3242

I thought this was America!

3243

Initial thoughts:

  • The Xbox One already had an excellent controller, and this is a nice evolution of it, especially the d-pad, which has a very pleasant tactile click to it now.
  • Load time reductions are the big instant highlight, going from 30 seconds down to 5 or so in Ninja Gaiden and a few other games that I tested.
  • The network transfer function seems to be broken. Tried to transfer a few installed games from the One X to the Series X. They could see one another on the network just fine, but no matter what I did, trying to actually transfer failed, so I gave up and just used the USB hard drive for it instead.
  • Smart Delivery doesn’t appear to include any sort of differential patching. I transferred a few Optimized for X|S games from the old system, and when trying to run them they claim to need an “upgrade” that appears to be the size of the entire game. I put off Gears 5 and Forza for now, since I’m already at 90% of my data cap for the month.
  • Ori and the Will of the Wisps looks astounding at 4K/120Hz with HDR. Almost wish I had saved it to play on this system.
  • Also dabbled a bit in Tetris Effect and Gears Tactics, both of which look and play great.
  • Haven’t actually bought a new game for it yet. I was initially thinking of DMCV SE or the Falconeer, but impressions on those haven’t been especially favorable so far, so I’m probably good sticking with Game Pass for now.
  • Overall, it feels like a nice PC upgrade – everything is familiar but snappier and nicer looking, which is fine by me.
3244

Feeling better about the S after playing yet more Odyssey (I mean, how much can I end up playing in my lifetime?) and some Star Wars Battlefront 2 online, though need some more time to get a handle on it. Gameplay is smoother and more responsive than the consoles of the past, and online shooters feel just more “solid”. I need to try some (I assume) CPU bounded games next.

OTOH, it felt like a big fail on my gaming Gsync gaming monitor. It didn’t detect 120hz without setting the HDMI signal manually, but even doing that at 1080P caused the screen to black out and eventually reset to previous settings, so all I could squeeze out of it was 60hz. My TV actually looked better, with the 4K upscaling and better signal processing.

3245
3246

Yea the insides have been shown, but still here’s the obligatory iFixit teardown.

3247

3248

Is there a way to get framerate measurement out of a console game without a huge amount of work? I’d like to test a couple of things but only have qualitative “feels like” judgements to go off of.

3249

Digital Foundry does it. No idea how though.

3250

Digital Foundry use a capture card.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-how-we-measure-console-frame-rate

The tools have developed immensely since we first started analysing console performance back in 2008, but the basic principle hasn’t changed. We use a high-end capture card to grab uncompressed video direct from the HDMI ports of our sources, and compare each individual frame to the one before it, searching for duplicate data, locating tear-lines, and calculating frame-rate from there.

3251

Yea, that’s more effort than I want to spend.

Setting the Series S to 1080p output on the TV seems to have not only increased the frame rate but increased the visual complexity, with all the upscaling going on both the Xbox and TV side. I’d like to quantify it… but not that much.

3252

What was it using before? 4k?

3253

Yea, it defaults to 1080p but i forced it to 4K the first time. It doesn’t, btw, default to 1440p. I assumed it would downsample per game as needed, but the screenshots i’m pulling off it are 4k screenshots or 1080p screenshots, depending on the display output setting.

I think the “influencer” messaging on the S wasn’t particularly great. This isn’t a 1440p and 120 fps box, and it was never intended to be - but that’s the impression they gave. It’s kind of a 1080p-4k OR (up to) 120 fps. But that also apparently there aren’t a lot of 1440p display output options on standard TVs so it’s not really an option there either.

I’m pretty sure setting it back down to 1080p has increased LOD as well as FPS… but, again, hard to measure this not being a professional console reviewer. I’ll just say it feels that way. I would like to see some FPS comparison videos by those sorts of guys though.