Xbox One S is Here and It Is Surprisingly Powerful

Xbox One S is finally out and the thing is, S is not just about the size – new version also happens to be more powerful! Digital Foundry’s review states that the new Xbox One S has a GPU clock-speed of 914MHz, up from 853MHz in the older unit, which leads us to a 7.1 per cent increase and ESRAM bandwidth increases in line, taking that up to 218GB/s effective. 

New system-on-chip (SoC) package also adds support for 4K HDR media and gaming. Upclocking the graphics core is there to support rendering real-time non-HDR versions of the game for the GameDVR feature, streaming and screenshots. In the end, the improvements do not necessarily improve experience for all the games out there, but some of them might benefit amazingly. 

Some games (ones that utilise dynamic resolution and/or unlocked frame-rates) may see a very minor performance improvement. Our testing internally has shown this to be pretty minor, and is only measurable on certain games, so we didn’t want to make it a ‘selling point’ for the new console.

Albert Penello, senior director of product management and planning at Microsoft

The difference can be mostly witnessed in games with an unlocked frame-rate, but there’s even more. Standard 30fps capped titles might benefit too compared to the performance on the original One. 

So, those of you thinking of the new version as only a smaller one might be wrong, at least in some cases.