Xbox One S Is Released – S Meaning Secrets

The Xbox One S got its long awaited release today.  The new console from Microsoft seems to be a hit already with gamers out there as retailers in the UK are already saying that nearly all of the day one stock has being sold out.  At Microsoft's E3 conference in June the world found out just what the S is all about, the machine itself is 40% smaller than the launch machine, it will allow for HDR gaming on titles that support it and 4K video playback, the power block is now contained inside the console and there is no longer anywhere to plug your Kinect camera in if you have one.  Microsoft also said that there would be no power advantage over the launch machine but that it seems is not the whole story, the wizards over at Digital Foundry have had a little time to test out Microsoft's new baby and it seems that there is a slight power advantage for the S over the launch console, lets take a little look.

Now I'm not going to go over the top with technical terms here, I'll just give you the basics of what Microsoft have done to slightly improve the performance of the S.  The boost comes from the improved GPU that's inside the S, the launch machine was clocked at 853Mhz but the new S clocks in at 914MHz and the S console also has a higher ESRAM bandwidth, 219GB/sec compared with 204GB/sec for the launch machine.  As I've said, these are only slight improvements are they will not be noticeable on all games, in fact most games won't see any difference at all.  Overall this will see about a 7% increase in power for the S and the reason for this increase I believe is to aid with the HDR capabilities of the machine.

Considering that the Xbox One is still being outsold 2:1 by the PS4, people out there may be wondering why Microsoft kept this to themselves.  Well the answer is simple, the slight boost does not amount to anything special and it will only apply to some older games, Microsoft can't really use it as a major selling point for the machine so they decided to keep it quiet and also even though the S is a little faster than the launch machine it still is some way off the the overall power of the PS4, the S runs at about 1.4TFLOPS while the PS4 runs at about 1.8TFLOPS.

The good news to come from the launch of the S is that it is selling fast, people seem to like the design and the size.  For folks that already own the launch machine, I can't see to many of them making the jump to the S, there is just no real reason to do so, maybe if you already own a 4K TV you might be interested but me anyway I think I'll be sticking to launch machine until the Scorpio arrives next year.