Digital Foundry vs. Xbox One S – Videos and Impressions – 3WIREL!
Digital Foundry goes into deep analysis of the Xbox One S graphical abilities over the original Xbox One and more with a number of articles. A choice quote and some image are listed below but its impressive to see this new Xbox One offer higher specs and power.
First up, a quick note on our testing profile. We used a launch Xbox One unit provided by Microsoft, along with a 2TB version of the new Xbox One S. In order to ensure parity, all titles were run from a 250GB Samsung SSD running in an external caddy over USB 3.0. The idea here is straightforward enough – to remove storage as a potential bottleneck and concentrate performance on the capabilities of the processor.
We kick off with a game we chose in order to highlight the maximum possible potential of the spec boost. Project Cars aims for 60fps, but in a rain-lashed Monaco stacked up with vehicles, it rarely achieves it. A heavy GPU load then, with lashings of bandwidth-intensive alpha effects – which we would assume are processed via ESRAM. Using the game's replay feature we can directly copy the rendering load across sessions. And the result? A seven per cent improvement may not sound immense, but this is averaged across the run. In the moment differentials can be as high as 5fps.
Restarting the replay from the third-person chase cam view – a gameplay angle – the performance increase rises to 11 per cent, and an in-the-moment max delta of 9fps. Now, examination of the footage does see a variation in the deployment of alpha effects – the storm is randomised to an extent – but the improvement is considerable, and repeatable. This is the spec boost at its greatest in a scenario we crafted to make the most of the Xbox One's faster clocks, but regardless, this is not insignificant.