News: 1599735236

"Gamers prioritize framerate over resolution"

Let's just put that on the shelf next to all the other no shit soundbites that marketing companies put out.

Resolution (past a certain point) is a nice to have, because a well designed game will look good at any resolution. Framerate is essential because any game will feel crap below

I grew up with 12fps 8-bit Amstrad and Spectrum games, and that lasted for so long that 60Hz looks smoother than molten butter, even today.

Young ones today, they grew up with 60Hz gaming, and they can tell it's 60Hz, and they claim to discern 120Hz, even 144Hz, and they need the 240Hz displays for their twitch gaming. It's all in their heads, of course to a certain extent, but as long as they pay, companies will attend to their desires.

Consoles have historically beaten PC's on price/performance because people writing games could get super close to the bare metal since they knew exactly what that was going to be. Any performance loss from lower specifications could be made up with much more efficient coding since there was no "Well, we have no idea what hardware you're actually using, so here's a massive abstraction layer" in play.

Clearly that's no longer the case, and the vast majority of games are going to be written using existing game engines with the intent that they will sell cross platform anyway, so honestly - in what way is this not just a small form factor PC?

I'm really sure I get the point of your post, but one way in that this console is not just a small form factor PC is the ability to flop down on the couch and just play, or watch, without the faff of having to think about a keyboard or mouse, or updating an O/S, or drivers, or changing a 1001 pointless settings that are there to satisfy people who would rather fuck about with aesthetic than be concerned with gameplay or story.

Not that I'd have an XBOX. I'm in the PS camp. Bring on the 5!!!!

Well, if the question can be answered by the answer to another question (Would this make a spiffy little Linux box?), then, Yes.

Assuming Microsoft haven't changed their approach significantly from the Xbox One - games will run inside a highly optimized VM which only implements the bare minimum of functionality, so while the APIs may be largely the same as running on Windows, the overhead of the Hardware Abstraction Layer will be massively reduced. Also background processes and the like will be far more tightly controlled.

Oh this will be fun ... previously one of the core advantages of consoles was that they were all the same. Will games be released for the cut down version only, two different versions or will the developers have to have one extensible version that either takes advantage of the improved performance of the full system or can degrade it's configuration to match the reduced performance of the cut down version?

Will games be cheaper for this version? The idea seems to fit with Xbox Game Pass, where machine owners never own the games, they just play and uninstall what they want.

The headline (which clearly refers to the cheaper model) says "and a Blu-Ray player" but the article says "doesn't have an optical drive".

???

It took me a moment, but the $200 referred to is the amount EXTRA that you pay for the bigger box.

4K displays arent cheap?? im not sure where microsoft are buying their TV's from these days, but whereever it is... they are getting ripped off!!! Currys have a 50" 4K TV for £320

Id hazard a guess that most new TV's are 4K, not because someone has demanded the spec, but because there seem to be more 4K units than Full HD these days.

I do see the argument that lower res&higher framerate will be a reasonable trade off for spending less for the casual gamer.

but I cant see the software houses discounting the titles for people with lower spec hardware, so the saving becomes moot after youve bought a few £70 games

The additional $200 gets you +512GB fast SSD (around $50 cost price to MS), +6GB GDDR6 (informed DRAM spot price info indicates this would be $66), +~170mm^2 additional 7nm silicon ($35) and the drive ($20) and any licensing fees (AMD, BluRay, etc, say $10) and improved cooling system ($5) - so it's not a bad deal to pay that extra $200 retail.

And as time goes on, the second hand game market will mean cheaper games.

Or there's that $35/m 'contract' including game pass.

TBH even on a 4K living room TV, at the typical viewing distance, the XSS's 1080p/1440p with Microsoft's AI upscaling to 4K will probably be nearly as good to the viewer's eyes. XSX will pull ahead if you sit close to the TV or you have a 75" or above TV. The $25/m deal for this however seems less interesting, as a tenner a month (cancel one of your other streaming subs that you never got around to cancelling) will get you the XSX.

I see this as MS trialling a download only Xbox to see what the demand is for people to still buy physical media. Although both the next gen xbox and PS both are still coming with optical drives, I do suspect that they will be the last to. As more and more people are getting used to the idea of buying and downloading online with app store and streaming services like Netflix people will probably just prefer the convenience of downloading a game than having to go to a store and buy it or wait for it to come mail order, to only find they need to download GB of patches before the game works anyway.

Plus I bet MS and Sony would love to make all their games download only. So they can get the 30% cut from purchases just like Apple and Google get with all their downloadable apps and cut out those pesky retail stores taking their percentage of the profit.