Michael Crider
We’re finally getting down to the wire for the next generation of game consoles. After months of leaks and one big leak over the long weekend, Microsoft has officially announced the Xbox Series S, the smaller, less expensive version of the Series X. The company confirmed that it will retail for $299.
👀 Let’s make it official!
Xbox Series S | Next-gen performance in the ˢᵐᵃˡˡᵉˢᵗ Xbox ever. $299 (ERP).
Looking forward to sharing more! Soon. Promise. pic.twitter.com/8wIEpLPVEq
— Xbox (@Xbox) September 8, 2020
The Series S will not be equipped with a disc drive, like the PS5 Digital Edition and the currently-sold Xbox One S All-Digital Edition. You can see that it’s more of a conventional shape than the skyscraper layout of the Xbox Series X, and based on the controller next to it, quite a bit smaller, too. Based on the orientation of the Xbox logo in the corner, it looks like you can lay it on its side or stand it up, in the style of the PS2 and Xbox 360.
no point holding this back now I guess pic.twitter.com/SgOAjm3BuP
— WalkingCat (@_h0x0d_) September 8, 2020
That’s about it in terms of confirmed data. A leaked commercial posted to Twitter this morning indicates that the Series S will be capable of “1440p at up to 120FPS”, along with ray-tracing and and a 512GB flash-based SSD storage. That’s impressive compared to current consoles, which tend to chug on 4K resolution, but the tiered nature of the console would mean that it would have to be much less powerful than the Series X. The latter uses a custom CPU and GPU from AMD rated at 12 teraflops with 16GB of GDDR6 RAM. There’s no indication of the comparative power of the One Series S, though presumably it would play the same games.
Other leaks this morning indicate that the Xbox Series X (man, those names are extremely Microsoft) would be $499, launching at the same time as the Series S on November 10th. Those are unconfirmed at the time of writing, but would make sense. Sony has yet to confirm a price or date for the PlayStation 5 (and its presumably cheaper Digital Edition).
Source: The Verge
