Xbox One S outperforms Xbox One in some games
The Xbox One S’s GPU is clocked 7.1 percent higher and the esram has a slightly higher bandwidth. This is apparent from the first tests with the console. At peak times, the system manages to achieve 9fps higher frame rates than the old Xbox One.
The changes to the AMD soc of the Xbox One S are enough to make a difference in some, but not all, benchmarks. Eurogamer and Digital Foundry conclude that after testing with the new console, Microsoft released the 2TB version of the Xbox One S on Tuesday.
Project Cars showed the greatest speed gain. In the third-person view, the difference rose to 11 percent with peak moments where the difference was 9fps. Hitman’s gameplay benchmark resulted in a difference of 8.1 percent and with Resident Evil 5 Remastered it was 2.5 percent. With Tomb Raider, the Xbox One S manages to hold the 30fps better and with Arkham Knight less tearing and stuttering would be visible, with Fallout 4 Digital Foundry could not detect any differences. In any case, the differences are only visible with GPU-intensive games or parts of games, the site notes.
According to Microsoft, a limited number of titles on the S can outperform the original One console, especially games with dynamic resolution and unlocked framerates. The company itself speaks of small performance improvements. Microsoft previously denied that the Xbox One S would be faster than the original model.
Microsoft has the semi-custom AMD soc of the S model made at TSMC on a 16nm finfet process. The Xbox One soc was still produced at 28nm. The process ensures more economical operation, more overclocking potential and a 33 percent smaller SOC. For cooling, Microsoft uses an aluminum heatsink with two copper heatpipes and a 120mm fan. To make the 4k display possible, the soc is equipped with a HEVC decoder, as well as support for HDMI 2.0 and HDCP 2.2. The S-model Blu-ray UHD player supports HDR10-based HDR playback with support for the Dolby Vision format ‘as an option’, probably meaning it can be added later with a firmware upgrade.
The design of the soc has remained unchanged. The cpu is still based on eight Jaguar cores, whose clock speed is still 1.75GHz. In particular, to ensure that the HDR display does not cause a performance penalty, Microsoft has increased the clock speed of the GPU, from 853MHz to 914MHz. This increase is accompanied by an increase in bandwidth, from 204GB/s to 219GB/s. For non-HDR titles, the performance increase would help with GameDVR functionality recording, streaming and screenshot taking.
| 1.75GHz AMD Jaguar octa-core | 1.75GHz AMD Jaguar octa-core |
| 12 Compute Units | 12 Compute Units |
| 914MHz | 853MHz |
| 1.4 teraflops | 1.31 teraflops |
| 219GB/s | 204GB/s |