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When Microsoft announced the Xbox One S and Xbox Scorpio earlier this year, the company’s strategy raised more than a few eyebrows. While the Xbox One midlife refresh was widely expected, there’s the chance Xbox One S sales will suffer if customers choose to wait for the significantly more powerful Project Scorpio, which is currently expected to launch at Christmas, 2017. Now that the refresh has dropped, does the Xbox One S pack enough improvements to justify its purchase?

The Xbox One S SoC has been overhauled and is now built on a 16nm FinFET process at TSMC. Die size has decreased from 363mm² to 240mm². The new chip also includes an updated HEVC decoder, HDMI 2.0 support, and HDCP 2.2. All of these changes were integrated on-die, though the GPU is still based on AMD’s earlier GCN architectures rather than Polaris.



The Xbox One S’s motherboard. Image by Eurogamer

Microsoft has said very little about any performance improvements in the Xbox One S, but extensive testing by Eurogamer has shown that the SoC’s GPU is sometimes faster than its predecessor. The GPU’s base clock has been increased to 914MHz, up from 853MHz in the original console. This small boost also increased the maximum theoretical bandwidth of the Xbox One’s ESRAM cache, up to 219GB/s from 204GB/s (actually achieved bandwidth in games is typically much lower).

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