Xbox Series S GPU "presents challenges" for next-gen games, says 4A

Microsoft’s Xbox Series S has been a battle of highs and lows straight from release. With a far lower-power GPU than the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X, the budget console presents challenges for next-gen development.

Following the reveal of Metro Exodus’ next-gen enhancements, developer 4A Games explained that future titles from the studio will face challenges when designing for the Series S console.

In an interview with WCCFTech, 4A Games’ chief technical officer Oleksandr Shyshkovtsov explains that the console’s lower amount of RAM isn’t an issue, but the GPU performance of the console is.

“The RAM is not an issue for us (currently), but GPU performance presents challenges for future titles,” Shyshkovtsov said. “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.”

4A Games’ plans for Metro Exodus are impressive, but other studios’ next-gen projects are very hit or miss on the smaller machine. Alongside lower resolutions, some games (such as Control) ditch visual features such as ray-tracing on the Series S to keep up performance.