Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry has been doing some excellent work lately – feeding into all of our curiosity and speculation about how the NX and PS4 Neo might perform. Recently they got ahold of the new Xbox One S and ran it through a series of tests and benchmarks. Their results weren’t shocking, but they were surprising. As it turns out, the Xbox One S does offer some noticeable performance boosts compared to the original Xbox One.
The bulk of the improvement is due to the fact that the Xbox One S uses an overclocked GPU that runs faster than the original. The Xbox One S GPU core frequency was recorded at 914MHz, compared to the Xbox One’s 853MHz. Microsoft originally claimed that this wouldn’t impact game performance at all, but it actually does, especially if developers choose to allow for unlocked frame rates. Digital Foundry found in their tests that the difference was small indeed – usually a three-to-four FPS improvement or less screen-tearing in demanding games. They did mention that in some games, however, an eight-to-ten FPS difference could be noted. The Xbox One S does run a little louder, though, so there’s that. Overall it sounds like a great purchase if you don’t already own an Xbox One, but not necessarily worth an upgrade. If you already own an Xbox One, I’d just hold out for Project Scorpio.