The Xbox Series S may not be able to run older Xbox games with the same enhancements seen on Xbox One X, according to a recent analysis.
According to Digital Foundry’s John Linneman, the less powerful next-gen console will not be able to play original Xbox and Xbox 360 titles with the enhancements available on Xbox One X mostly due to the available RAM, as the Xbox Series X has 8 GB of available RAM as opposed to the Xbox One X 9GB. As such, the Series S is likely going to play backward compatible games in Xbox One S mode.
This, however, doesn’t mean that some games will not be running much better on Xbox Series S than they do on Xbox One S, thanks to the better CPU, GPU, and SSD which may improve performance for select titles.
It may be running backwards compatible games in Xbox One S mode, but because the GPU is so much more capable, and knowing what we know about how backwards compatibility works, you should actually still be able to clean up performance issues,” Linneman said.
So games that maybe struggled on Xbox One S, either the dynamic resolution was overly-aggressive, with slowdown and things like that, conceivably they could actually run noticeably smoother on this machine.
The new Xbox Series X video analysis also reveals some interesting tidbits, like Digital Foundry knowing about the console since March and more. You can check it out in full right below.
The Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S release worldwide on November 10th.
