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Report: Xbox One S Brings Slight Performance Boost Over Launch Units
Microsoft's Xbox One S is out today in its Launch Edition configuration, which gets you the 2 TB version of the hardware for about $300. As we wrote in our review, it adds some bells and whistles for people who have taken the 4K plunge, but it looks as though it might come with some bonuses where it counts: games. According to an in-depth hardware analysis from Digital Foundry, players may see some performance boosts on the new hardware.
We've known all along that the revised hardware has a slightly faster GPU clock speed, but Microsoft has gone out of its way to say that it wouldn't affect gaming at all. Thanks to Digital Foundry's benchmarking, however, we have some real-world examples of how that's not exactly true. The results varied depending on where the bottlenecks were. In games that were particularly CPU intensive, the increased GPU horsepower did little, if anything. In some cases, such as Project Cars, it resulted in a maximum increase of 9 FPS.
The entire breakdown is interesting, and well worth the read. The short version is that it's far from a framerate panacea, but it does help out in some games. Not bad.
[Source: Digital Foundry]
Our Take
I just bought a gaming PC, so the Xbox One S isn't even on my radar at this point. It's nice to see that some games can get a nice boost with the hardware. I suppose this is the part where I snicker at 30 FPS gaming.
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