About seven months ago, I unplugged my Xbox One X and set it aside, replacing it with Microsoft’s powerful new Xbox Series X. As I wrote in my review for that latter console, the Series X is all about promise: Better performance, graphics, sound, and power management. But it’s also about retaining a path from the past, so it runs the same Dashboard and shell, albeit it more efficiently. And it runs the same games and apps, at least for now, until game makers move on to supporting only the latest hardware.
In the months since I wrote my review, not much has changed: I gave up on newer Call of Duty (COD) titles like Modern Warfare (2019) and Black Ops Cold War, which I find to be problematic for various reasons, and have mostly stuck with an older COD title, Black Ops 4, while experimenting with other games, including Don’t Tell Me, Resident Evil Village, DOOM Eternal, and others.
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From a day-to-day perspective, it’s all very familiar. Microsoft’s newest consoles, the Series X and S, have two big advantages over their predecessors, at least when it comes to playing the existing catalog of games. They load games much more quickly, especially those that support Quick Resume, and they improve the graphics and gameplay in ways that range from subtle to profound, depending on the title.
But you get used to it. And over the several months since I moved to the Series X, I’ve wondered from time to time about comparing this experience to other consoles. The Xbox Series S, most obviously, since most of the games I play now probably don’t benefit all that much from the extra power provided by the Series X. And the Xbox One X, which is arguably optimized for 1440p graphics at 60 frames-per-second (fps), as opposed to 4K at 60 fps/120 fps.
The Xbox One X. Hm.
One of the best ways in which one can gauge the efficacy of any upgrade is to go back later and reuse the old product. So, in this case, I decided to dust off my Xbox One X, plug it into the gaming display I purchased for the Xbox Series X, and see how the experience holds up on the older console. With months of Xbox Series X experience behind me, I felt that this might be instructive.
And it was. Though it took a while.
For starters, I needed to install a 4 GB system update before I could even use the console. And when I finally booted into the perhaps overly-familiar Dashboard UI, I headed directly into My games & apps to see about updates. There were 11 waiting, mostly for apps, but also a few very large games, like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. So I let that all happen.
I also stuck with an older Xbox One Wireless Controller even though the newer Xbox Wireless Controllers which arrived with the Xbox Series X|S would work just fine with the older console. I wanted this comparison to be as night and day as possible.
Firing up Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, the differences were immediately obvious. The game did shift my display into HDR mode, which is great. But it also took a noticeably long time just to load and sync, and then another interminable amount of time to get past the opening credits. 9 months ago, this was the best videogame console that Microsoft had ever made.
But overall, the game, which dates back to 2018, looked basically identical to the experience on the Series X. There is perhaps less graphical detail in the map loading animations, which preview each level, and they take longer to start up. And then again in the game itself.
The controller differences are even subtler. I like the grippy texture on the newer controller’s two arms (for lack of a better term) and triggers. And the Share button, which triggers screenshots and video recordings, is likewise quite useful. But my previous-generation controller worked just fine, thank you very much.
What this all adds up to, for this one game, is a very subtle advantage on a console that would set you back $500 assuming, of course, that you could even buy one in the first place: The Xbox Series X|S, like Sony’s PlayStation 5, remains very hard to find here in mid-2021. And the console makers have warned that supply shortages will continue for quite some time going forward.
One difference is quite noticeable: Where the Xbox Series X performs its work silently all day long if needed, the Xbox One X fires up a loud fan noise the minute you jump into a game, and then that noise continues unabated until you’re done playing. I guess it doesn’t matter if this welcome improvement is due to the form factor change—the Xbox One X is a standard pizza-box console shape with little room for cooling—or architectural improvements. Or both. But it’s real.
What I’m left with here is what I started with when I reviewed the Xbox Series X last November. The advantages of this console today are real but remain relatively minor while we wait for a coming generation of games that really takes advantage of the newer hardware. The basic overall experience, however, is slower but it’s otherwise nearly identical to that of the Xbox One X. At least with older games, though the differences will grow greater if you’re still using an Xbox One S or OG Xbox One.
In one sense, I suppose the ongoing console shortage has its silver lining. Your inability to get a new Xbox Series X or S might seem problematic. And I realize there are those who need a new console, perhaps because their current Xbox is quite out-of-date or even broken. But you’re probably better off waiting in most cases anyway.
zekepliskin
<p>I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; Quick Resume is a more valuable feature to me than the Dualsense, as impressive as that is. I would gladly surrender a little more internal SSD space on the Series X to have even more Quick Resume titles saved up, more so if they could be saved when switching between Retail Mode and Dev Mode.</p>
zekepliskin
<p>Or you can just hit up Facebook Marketplace and get one at or below RRP, sometimes basically New In Box, too. That’s what I did. The guy I bought it from paid £750, sold it to me for RRP as he "couldn’t see the difference between One X and Series X" and it was manufactured April 2021. It’s basically new.</p>
zekepliskin
<p>I agree; the One X has a massively powerful GPU attached to an uprated but still hamstrung CPU. That damn Jaguar platform really started to hold the generation back after a couple of years and I think if Sony and Microsoft had the generation over again they would have gone for a more scalable option that better supported mid-generation refreshes. Instead, for compatibility they had to stick with it.</p><p><br></p><p>What’s interesting to me is that even games that aren’t "Series X|S Enhanced" but are/were "Xbox One X Enhanced" can benefit from the performance boost even if they don’t support FPS Boost. For example, <em>The Witcher 3</em> which can run 1080p60 upscaled to 4K in One X Performance Mode used to drop frames to about the 30-45FPS range when in Oxenfurt, Novigrad and other places with lots of assets and NPCs on screen, whereas on the Series X it seems to be a solid 60FPS everywhere.</p>
zekepliskin
<p>I jumped back into the world of Xbox gaming in January, with an Xbox One X. Loved it, was totally impressed with what Microsoft achieved having had a PS4, then PS4 Slim, then PS4 Pro, all of which gathered dust as I hated the sluggish interface and the way I told it to download updates and install overnight which it never did. Really poor design.</p><p><br></p><p>Ended up playing the hell out of it for months, more than I had gamed in years actually. So much so that I ended up selling my Switch and PS4 Pro after I picked up an Xbox Series X (second hand, but only paid retail price for it and it was new in April 2021, so I registered it for warranty support on my Xbox Live account).</p><p><br></p><p>They’re both great consoles. The One X has a "modernised PS2" look about it, and a great design which is easyish to disassemble for cleaning, which I did, and the fan/thermal/power ramping is really well done. It draws a lot less power in idle than any PS4 did. My One X had an SSD for a bit which helped loading times and dashboard responsiveness. It puts less "nonsense" between you, the gamer, and the games themselves, Game Pass is a great deal especially when on £3 for 3 months or the current £1 for 3 months, and so on. Just prefer the "ecosystem" if you want to call it that to anything Sony has done, which often felt like the bare minimum to keep people playing and paying.</p><p><br></p><p>Microsoft sometimes gets unfairly criticised for not innovating, well, they did innovate with the OG Xbox actually, with it being the first mainstream console to have a hard-drive and ethernet as standard, pioneered online console gaming and so on. Sony only really got into the market because Nintendo broadsided them when they chose Philips (one of those many major dumb Nintendo mistakes, like that terrible Bob Hoskins led Mario movie in the 90s), let’s remember.</p><p><br></p><p>The Series X is more of the same but that little better in every way – like the "finishing touches" to what they started with the One X. Dashboard is even faster, games load in a blink if saved on Quick Resume (including, to my impressed surprise, OG Xbox and Xbox 360 titles), it reboots and comes out of sleep faster. All that extra horsepower can be leveraged for RetroArch too – I’ve been having fun running <em>Mario Kart: Double Dash!! </em>on it in Dev Mode with some upscaling and widescreen hacks patched in, it’s pretty close to flawless whereas the One X couldn’t handle it.</p><p><br></p><p>I think the Series X is promising, but like any and every console generation, that promise takes a couple of years to be fulfilled as the changeover from last to current gen happens. The PS2 took a few years to get rolling and that too was a console aided by having excellent backwards compatibility as a tide-over until the then "next gen" games came, and I remember that it was about 2004 onwards (for me personally, the original <em>God of War</em>) that it really went full swing and became the must-have console. It’ll probably be even slower this time around due to the pandemic slowing not just development of the games themselves, but the silicon shortage – all things that are just now being felt due to the way production lines are often planned years in advance.</p><p><br></p><p>So yeah, for me a worthy upgrade, and being able to bounce between <em>Red Dead Redemption II, The Witcher 3, Forza Horizon 4 </em>and <em>Call of Duty: Black Ops </em>in mere seconds as opposed to enduring long load times is already worth the investment, and unlike some of the more impatient gamers out there I’m happy to wait for the next-gen killer apps to start trickling through. All those huge studios that Microsoft now own are gearing up for what I imagine will be a glut of releases through 2022 and 2023. I don’t expect anything major this year, but that’s okay – I still have plenty of older games to plough through, emulation to setup (I believe the Series X can emulate a fair few PS2 titles at full speed, for example) so it’s gonna be a fun wait.</p>