While the announcement of the $299 Xbox Series S which is going to the next-gen 1440p console from Microsoft was positive news for gamers, it won’t make developers’ lives easier. Sasan Sepehr, a senior technical producer at Remedy Tweeted that this will be “trouble” for the Technical Teams at various studios.
When asked why he responded by saying that “optimizing” games for the next-gen Xbox consoles will take more effort.
While we do understand that this adds to the already packed workload of game optimization, MS already had two consoles this generation as well (One and One X). Furthermore, the unification of the PC and Xbox platforms using the DirectX 12 Ultimate API should further make this task easier.
At worse, reducing the resolution and/or target FPS should do the trick as both consoles feature the same architecture. Only the number of ALUs and amount of available memory are different. The feature-level and technologies supported are identical. You can read more about the specs of the Series S here: