Game Screenshots on Xbox Series S Will Soon be Restricted to 1080p

The upcoming February update for Xbox consoles is going to make the Xbox Series S slightly worse if you enjoy taking game screenshots and keeping a trace of your gaming adventures. The latest Xbox Insider builds have now restricted screenshot resolution on the Series S to 1080p, even if you have a higher resolution configured on the console.

“Screenshots captured on Xbox Series S consoles will now have a maximum resolution of 1080p, matching the maximum resolution for game clips,” the Xbox Insider team explained yesterday in the patch notes for the latest preview update for the Omega ring. This is the Insider ring that gets the latest Xbox updates before they’re released to the public, but this change to Game DVR on the Series S was first introduced on the Alpha ring in early December.

As of today, you can hook up an Xbox Series S to a 1440p or 4K display, and the console will upscale games and let you capture screenshots in your native resolution. Game clips, however, have always been restricted to 1080p on the Series S. You need a more expensive Xbox Series X to record game clips in 4K quality.

Overall, this new 1080p restriction for game screenshots on the Series S is quite surprising. Why remove a feature that works just fine today? I asked the Xbox team why the Series S was about to lose the ability to capture screenshots in higher resolutions, but I couldn’t get an answer at the time of publication.

You may remember that Microsoft originally marketed the Series S as a 1440p/60FPS machine. If very few current-gen games actually reach this performance target on the budget console, the Series S received a small memory boost almost two years ago thanks to an updated Game Development Kit (GDK) from Microsoft.

If the February Xbox update is about to degrade Game DVR on the Series S, the new bits will bring a couple of new features such as new filter and sorting options in the My Games & Apps screen. The Xbox Accessories app will also add a new thumbstick calibration tool to help users fix stick drift issues on their controllers.