Larian has delayed the release of Baldur’s Gate 3, currently on pace to possibly be 2023’s Game of the Year, until they can figure out how to make split-screen work on Series S.
 I have a series S and even I think it’s unreasonable to expect full parity with a PS5/XSX after three or four years. It’s a $300 piece of hardware - it is remarkable what it does at its price point. It will be useful for a good 10 years, but it will not be able to keep up with new games after 5 at most in my opinion. It’ll be great for Indies or back catalogs.
They need to stop trying to make it functionally a series X and focus more on making it a gamepass/xcloud machine. As it is, it’s just an albatross around their neck.
Edit: Everything signaled that they were going to make it into a xcloud machine essentially. I’m not sure why they haven’t really pushed that harder.
I feel like their planning for it was really shortsighted - like they were hoping to get a as many people to buy the console as possible so they could “win” the console war early by having more people adopt it by putting out a cheap console people who didn’t want to spend so much would be drawn to, and weren’t really thinking beyond the first few years of the generation. Maybe they figured once they had the lead, they cold get people up upgrade or something. By they didn’t get the early lead and now the cheaper console means devs can’t really fully develop for Xbox. This will only get worse as more games start getting developed.
Microsoft is terrible at Gaming. I fear how everyone seems to be ok with them buying companies up and putting games on GamePass. It’s not going to end well. It’s not even going well if you really take notice.
It’s going great for me as the consumer with Game Pass. I have had over two years of essentially free games, because Microsoft rewards is too generous and easy to exploit. But I have no illusions about whether or not this consolidation is good for the industry. It simply isn’t. Yeah I guess y’all can call me out or whatever for using it anyway, but the series S with nearly free GamePass has just been too good for me as a dad with a full-time job and children. I’m still against the merger lol
I vote with my dollar where I can, but sorry, sometimes I make compromises just like anybody else. That being said, if I have to start actually paying for it, even at the current price, I’m out. So basically it depends on when they decide they don’t want rewards to stay around.
I still don’t really understand this. Local splitscreen on a game the size of baldurs gate does make sense to me as being a technical hurdle, obviously rendering the game world twice is extremely taxing.
I keep seeing complaints about other games also, lots off people seem to be blaming the Series S for Remnant 2s slow xbox patches.
The Series S is basically an X with a weaker GPU, how are games (that also release on PC) not scalable enough to run on the S at 1080p when they can run at 4k on the X? I’d love a technical answer, if I replace my 3080 with a 1060 I could run the game on my PC and a lower resolution/graphic settings. How is this different from the Series X/S? I’m not a programmer/developer and I’d really like if someone could explain too me why the Series S is a problem because from my view point it’s lazy developers with unoptimised games
did you think of the possibility that even Larian’s low settings still can’t run on series S? Given the amount of assets I saw it’s actually quite possible that vram requirement are pretty high and that’s why PS5 have delay as well so they can figure out ways to consolidate textures used etc. Like they can’t even manage to let me stack rope or water bottle properly in inventory(maybe some asset id not cleaned up during development), so having excessive vram usage is fairly easy/common for content heavy games.
Today’s Digital Foundry video suggests that this is far from the issue. Even the highest texture settings fit comfortably in 6 GB. IIRC it was around 4,5 - and consoles typically go for high rather than ultra settings.
Xbox series S have 8GB for game, so while BG3 might consume around 4-5GB on PC, console with unified memory couldn’t afford this. All the other assets(model/animation/audio clips/massive amount of icons) needs to be loaded as well. With split screen, you can have one person tries to go into conversation (that streaming in high res texture/face models, etc) while the other one stay and still render the world with all the things their camera can move around with.
I went back and had a look. It’s between 2165MB and 3720 MB based on settings. Doesn’t really seem problematic on the low end.
I don’t know what to say other than maybe you should send Larian your resume and type “I am sure series S can be ported no issue, here is my numbers.” I am sure Larian would love to have simultaneous launch like PS5 and you can cut a really good deal if you can manage to pull that. BUT, you would have to pass the [Persuasion] check though, hope you have high cha to back it up. :)
Very funny. Just saying that textures don’t seem to be the issue. Any number of other things might be from rendering methods to whatever.
For one viewport!
The problem with Series S is split screen.
Also that’s 6GB of dedicated VRAM. Consoles have unified memory, so you need to fit the OS and the non-graphics memory in there too.
That’s only VRAM. You’re missing the other half.
It’s unified RAM on Xbox. And medium settings are 2165MB on PC.
To be clear, I’m not trying to attack Larian here. I think splitscreen is a much bigger technical hurdle than other games have to deal with and delaying it on the Xbox was the right idea. But, the PC versions minimum requirements is 4GB vram and recommended 8GB vram. The Series S has 10GB vram. I’m more annoyed by the anti Series S rhetoric going around about it holding all games back, because most games with a PC release scale no problem
It’s not baseless rhetoric when a dev team has literally called it out as a big tech hurdle.
What you’re not seeing or understanding:
The Xbox Seried S does not have 10GB VRAM it has 10GB VRAM/RAM that can be dynamically allocated to whatever the game needs.
Baldur’s Gate 3 needs 12GB combined VRAM/RAM at minimum. While the Xbox OS peobably doesn’t eat as much RAM as Windows does the difference is apparently not 2GB which leaves the Series S with not eniugh RAM to power the game.
As others mentioned for the Steamdeck Splitscreen was disabled, however that was likely done to save GPU performance, unlike the Series S the Steamdeck has enough RAM (16GB) to meet the minimum requirements.
See my other reply, 4gb beam is not the same requirement for series S cause consoles use unified memory.(also it only have 8GB for game)
https://www.thegamer.com/xbox-series-s-apparently-vram-issues/
It wasn’t delayed on the PS5; that was the original release plan. They moved the release UP for PC because they didn’t want to have to compete with Starfield’s release. Since that’s not coming out on PS5, they left the release date as is.
Right, I forgot about this, thanks for correction.
The Series S is basically an X with a weaker GPU
And significantly less RAM, which is probably the issue here.
The main difficulty with split screen is that you need to be able to fit everything you need to render the scene into RAM, twice. Let’s go through some cases:
Just rendering to a higher resolution still lets you get away with the same amount of RAM if you use low-res textures, or a moderate increase because you’re using high-res textures, but only in the foreground – all you need is enough GPU compute power to push the pixels.
If you’re rendering VR both camera perspectives are going to be nearly identical, looking at the same objects, so RAM use is nearly identical to a single camera. Your frame time targets are much stricter in VR, you have to have high and very regular fps or people are going to puke, but again that’s compute pressure, not memory pressure.
In the split-screen case all bets are off: When players are at opposite sides of the map there may be literally zero meshes and textures in common between those two areas and you need twice the RAM for twice the amount of camera views. Nothing in common is the worst case, yes, but it’s bound to happen, and not leave PR in a situation where they have to say “We degraded performance when players are far apart to promote an atmosphere of closeness and cooperation”.
Xbox owners who are not following video game news every second of the day might find themselves buying a Series S version thinking they can play co-op with their friend who owns a Series X and they…can’t.
The problem here is implied to be local co-op between X and S players?
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The Series S is basically an X with a weaker GPU
If it was just a GPU difference, you’d be right it should be easy to just run it less pretty. But the memory limitations are the real issue. The X has 16 GB of memory and the S has 10 GB. And worse, the memory performance is drastically different. The X has 10 GB that runs at 560 GB/s and 6 that runs at 336 GB/s, where as the S has 8 GB at 224 GB/s and 2 GB at 56GB/s. (I did not miss a zero on the last value)
Holy crap that’s an absurd kneecapping with the RAM. No wonder they’re having parity issues
It has less RAM than the Xbox ONE X as well and is incapable of running backwards compatible games with Xbox One X enhancements.
Something I’ve been saying since the beginning, nice that people are catching up…
FTA: “The Xbox Series S was cheaper, but lacked the horsepower of the more expensive Series X.”
It’s not just that, the Series S lacks the power of the PREVIOUS GEN Xbox One X. The RAM limitations makes it impossible for it to run backwards compatible titles with the Xbox One X enhancements. AND it doesn’t have the 4K Blu Ray drive present in both the Xbox One S and Xbox One X.
This is the first time a console developer has released a new machine less capable than equivalent machines in the prior generation.
This is the first time a console developer has released a new machine less capable than equivalent machines in the prior generation. PS3’s switch to cell architecture springs to mind, which put game devs on their back feet trying to write code for it and made backwards compatibility impossible without including a PS2 in the case.
Sorry but I cannot agree with that take. The PS3 was difficult to develop for, sure, but it was immensely more capable than the PS2 architecture. See what naughty dog was able to produce on it in the last years of the console lifespan.
But I do agree that for developers, the PS3 was a step backwards in terms of ease of use and tooling. And luckily they fixed that by basing PS4 on PC architecture.
Still, I flippin’ love the PS3 🥲
No Series S owner will be mad if a game has Series X specific exclusive content. MS is shooting itself in the foot
I think people would be mad. Imagine you play a game at your friend’s home on his Series X, and then proceed to buy the game so you can play multiplayer online, only to then have a certain features or game modes missing (say you get team death match but not battle royale because it uses too much memory).
It’s not that easy to communicate feature disparity. Some people probably don’t even know which Xbox they have.
At some point, it’s on you to know what your machine can and can’t handle. They put big letters on the front of each game telling you if it’s able to play on the series X and series S. It is right there lol. 
Also, with smart delivery, it would probably be trivial for Microsoft to have a modal pop up saying “this game is not optimized for series S and will not play, do you still want to purchase?”
No, the real issue here is developers (not their fault mind you). The moment Microsoft says “you don’t have to make it playable on the S,“ they simply won’t. Because why would you? 
A dev team is more likely to axe Xbox release or features. So because S won’t have enough memory/gpu grunt, X won’t be getting that feature either.
Why would they completely abandon Xbox just because the series S won’t be required? 
S is required if you want to release a game on X. This means you cannot leverage the technical maximum of X, ever, because the game and all it’s features must run on S.
Yes we know. The comment at the top of this chain is talking about whether or not Microsoft could stop allowing that requirement and the potential blowback. Scroll to the top and start from the beginning you’ll see. 
You still don’t seem to comprehend what I said. Hint: not about blowback.
If a game can’t run on the Series S it means it also can’t be ported to the PC. Turn down the resolution and graphics settings until you get the same fps target and continue in with your day.
I would expect any game from a developer that complains about this to be so poorly optimized that it runs like it would on the Series S on the bigger consoles, and likely have garbage gameplay as well because they spent all of their budget on graphics.
Ok, but game they’re talking about here, Baldur’s Gate 3, runs just fine on PC. But they can’t get a specific feature to run on Series S that can run on X. You might want to read the article before commenting?
Hell it runs on a steam deck
What. None of this comment makes any sense.
Lazy devs don’t understand what scaling is. They advertised this game as Steam Deck compatible which has a way weaker CPU, GPU, storage (most people are playing on an SD card), and most importantly memory bandwidth. This game runs perfectly fine on PCs with slower CPU/GPU combos than the Series S. It’s literally just laziness and knowing people will just accept their shitty excuses.
I always love when the ignorant calls other lazy for not understanding basic things about game development. They understand perfectly well what scaling is and they’re not lazy. Have you played a single second of BG3? They’re literally the opposite of lazy. You sound like a salty xbox fanboy.
Larian have disabled split screen on the Steam Deck to account for that lower power. They can’t do the same thing for the XBox S release because Microsoft demand feature parity with the X.
So drop the rendering resolution/texture quality/render distance until it runs well enough on the Series S. Aka scaling. This is basic shit that has existed forever on PC. Like I said this game runs perfectly fine on PCs with less power than the Series S.
The problem is almost certainly RAM, not computational horsepower. XSS has nearly identical CPU capability to the XSX, so that won’t be the issue. It has a much weaker GPU, but resolutions and effects can be lowered. Where the XSS cannot linearly scale from the XSX is with RAM requirements: it has much less RAM, for anything that is not predominantly using that RAM for VRAM purposes, that cannot be scaled down trivially.
That the issue is showing up with split screen is a strong auger towards the issue being RAM. For split screen the game needs to keep two world-states in memory to handle the characters not being in the exact same place. With enough work they can probably optimize the RAM usage enough to make that work, which is why they still intend to release on XSS/XSX. But they also don’t know when, because that’s a lot of work and not certain.
They can almost certainly fix that with a combination of a lower rendering distance (less stuff to load in the first place) combined with lower quality assets in split screen (every individual asset uses less memory). Again. This stuff is basic. Really you’re supposed to build for your minimum spec first and scale up from there. I guess they were more concerned with bear sex than getting their game to run on all platforms.
I’m sure the professional game developers with decades of experience will be so thankful to hear that. You should inform them right away of how “basic” the fix to their problem really is. I’m sure it’ll be news to them and work right away.
It doesn’t support split screen on the Steam Deck either. If they could release without split screen support it would be out on Xbox now.
Get a proper machine then. Having a cheap Console device is a sign of laziness.
Why don’t you work harder and get a better device?
Well this is concerning. I’ve got a PS5 and was going to buy a XSX this week so I could pre-order Starfield, now I might wait and see how this plays out. What’s going to happen with Starfield & Elder Scrolls 6 (whenever it’s released)? The Series S is going to fuck up everything.
Why do you think Halo never got split screen 💁♂️
Cause 343 is a bad studio. Lmao
Both things are true tho.
There’s a difference between targeting 3-4 console SKUs and targeting 2. If you know what’s going to be your baseline from day 1, you test against that and scale up rather than the other way around. With a first party studio, this is a given.
I thought texture sampler feedback could help mitigate the ram issue?
