Xbox Series S won’t offer Xbox One X game enhancements

The Xbox Series S is shaping up to be a powerful next-generation video game console at a great price. Unfortunately, there’s at least one way in which it won’t be as powerful as its current-get sibling.

In a new article over on Gamespew, Microsoft has confirmed that Xbox One games played on an Xbox Series S will play the same as they did on a One S—as in, without any of the fancy One X enhancements many games received.

“Xbox Series S was designed to be the most affordable next generation console and play next generation games at 1440P at 60fps. To deliver the highest quality backwards compatible experience consistent with the developer’s original intent, the Xbox Series S runs the Xbox One S version of backward compatible games while applying improved texture filtering, higher and more consistent frame rates, faster load times and Auto HDR.”

The reason for this seems to simply be a case of hardware. While the Xbox Series S is, at its core, a more powerful machine capable of next-gen gaming experiences, it’s missing some of the technical aspects that made Xbox One X enhancements possible, such as the larger RAM pool.

While the lack of those improvements is a shame, Xbox One games will still run better on the Series S than they did on the One S, thanks to boosts for all backward-compatible games in terms of load times, frame rates, texture filtering, and auto HDR.

The Xbox Series X, meanwhile, should gain all of those benefits on top of the previously-existing Xbox One X enhancements when playing Xbox One titles.

Source: Gamespew