TECH NEWS

 Hello ladies and gents this is the Viking telling you that today we are talking about

Xbox Series S review: a cool little console with a big identity crisis

Microsoft's junior new console is beautiful, affordable and arrives with access to the same games library as the Series X – but who is it for?

The new console generation is shaping up to be a strange one, at least as far as Microsoft is concerned. From a naming convention that potentially confused people, to launching two separate-but-sorta-equal consoles on day one – the all-powerful, disc based Xbox Series X, and the smaller, all-digital, but lower spec £250 Xbox Series S – it's tough to gauge if the Seattle tech giant is covering all bases or just throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks.

The argument might go that the Series X is for the hardcore – the players who use 'Gamer' as an identity, who want the biggest bang for their buck, the most powerful machine, the most versatile features, and media experiences that threaten to burst their eyeballs with up to 8K visuals. If that's the case, then the Series S must be for... well, everyone else.

At a glance, that would seem to be the case. At an experiential level, they're remarkably similar – both the Series X and Series S deliver the same user interface, run on super-fast NVMe SSD drives to boost performance and load times, and pack in tricks such as Quick Resume, which allows several games to be suspended at once, allowing you to hop between games without losing progress.

The Series S is just less powerful while doing all that. Its processor is a little slower – the X has an 8-core Zen 2 at 3.8GHz; the S the same but maxed at 3.6GHz – and only packs in 10GB of memory versus 16GB on the X. The biggest material difference, besides the absence of the disc drive, is the lower spec GPU in the Series S. Both feature custom AMD Radeon RDNA 2 architecture, but the Series X boasts 52 Compute Units of rendering power running and 1.825 GHz, while Series S musters only 20 CUs at 1.565 GHz.

But such talk of specs and numbers almost undermines what the Series X feels like it's about. Where Series X is screaming in your face about how tough and powerful it is, Series S is just chilling, confident in its capabilities. It knows it's going to give you a good time, and in practice, it delivers, offering access to all the same games as Series X, but charging you £200 less for the privilege.

However, the merits of Series S only really come to bear if you've yet to upgrade to a 4K TV. On a 1080p screen, it all looks fantastic – the S is capable of 1440p resolution and targets 120fps frame rates. It practically glistens on an older set. Switch to a 4K TV though, and it's just a little too obvious that it's not even upscaling its gaming output, let alone running comparable to Series X. Gears Tactics, which served as our benchmark across both Series X and Series S, looks notably lower resolution when playing on Series S connected to a 4K OLED screen, and we even noticed a few moments of pop-in.

Of course, with no optical drive, it doesn't need to worry about 4K UHD performance, but it does claim to stream video content in 4K. This is upscaled though, so your premium Netflix subscription won't get the best return on your investment if playing through Xbox Series S. It also has an odd approach to backwards compatibility – despite being less powerful than the Series X, the Series S should easily match the performance of the Xbox One X, yet last generation games that were optimised for the One X will run as if on the even lower spec One S if played on the Series S. Told you that the naming conventions were confusing.

Another worrying aspect of the Series S is storage. Like its more powerful sibling, a huge chunk of the internal storage is given over to system files. However, given the Series S has just over half the total capacity – 512GB vs 1TB on the X – the ratio is even more unfavourable. Of the storage space the console ships with, only 364GB is actually useable for game and app storage.

On paper, this should be mitigated by Microsoft's Smart Delivery technology, which allows each console in the Xbox family to download the appropriate version of a game for its specifications. For example, on a cross-generation game like Gears 5, an Xbox One X won't try to pull down the more demanding version optimised for the new Series generation. Microsoft even confirmed in October that game installs will be 30 per cent smaller on the Series S than the X, given it won't need the larger assets that Series X does to deliver a true 4K experience.

And as always have a chilled day from the Viking