Larian is having trouble fitting Baldur’s Gate III on the Xbox Series S, the lower-priced and lower-powered console in Microsoft’s ninth-generation lineup.
I was looking up more information on why there’s such an issue getting BG3 on Xbox, and found this article with a lot more detail on the topic.
EDIT: The issue isn’t graphics or frame rate; it’s memory. The article goes into detail.
The GPU of the series S is simply a lot worse, socutting quality by a bit won’t cut it. I also suspect that since they always quote the split screen as problem, it might be about the number of textures to be loaded in when the game is kind of running twice, not the quality.
RAM is the big bottle neck here.
Here’s the comparison:
PS5: 16 GB/256-bit GDDR6 SDRAM
512 MB DDR4 RAM
Series X: 10 GB/320-bit & 6 GB/192-bit (16 GB total)
Series S: 8 GB/128-bit & 2 GB/32-bit (10 GB total)
But more than that, it’s the speeds involved:
PS5 Peak Bandwidth 448 GB/s
Xbox Series X 10 GB 560 GB/s and 6 GB 336 GB/s
Xbox Series S 8 GB 224 GB/s and 2 GB with 56 GB/s
So not just less RAM, but at 1/2 the speed.
Why would you load a texture twice in memory? Especially if it’s for the exact same object? It only needs to be rendered twice the texture stays the same and therefore only need to be stored once in ram…
He didn’t say load a texture twice, he said twice the textures - which is a worst case scenario, but you could get if the players aren’t near to each other.