Microsoft's next generation of consoles have officially been confirmed as the Xbox Series X and the Xbox Series S - which understandably has left a lot of people confused as to what the key differences are between these consoles, considering the massive price gap as well. In short, the Xbox Series X is the superior and more powerful of the two, while the Xbox Series S is the more budget-friendly and less powerful model - despite both still being next-gen worthy. However, if we dig a little deeper, we'll be able to see just how different (or similar) they really are.



The immediate observation is the actual size of both consoles when put next to each other. The Xbox Series S is apparently touted as being 60% smaller than the Xbox Series X, and while shells are floating around at selected media outlets, we'd rather wait for hands-on time with the final product to confirm this.

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The first difference is the price and purpose of both consoles. The Xbox Series X will cost $499 / R11999 and allow you to use physical discs with a built-in disc drive, while the Xbox Series S will cost only $299 / R6999 and won't offer a disc drive to play physical discs. With such a wide price gap, you might be wondering if they're really counterparts of the same next-gen hardware. The answer may surprise you.

First and foremost is the RAM. The Xbox Series X will have 16GB DDR6 RAM, while the Xbox Series S will be a bit less with 10GB DDR6 RAM. The Xbox Series X will also contain a 4K UHD Blu-Ray drive, while the Xbox Series S naturally won't as it doesn't have a drive to begin with.

As far as the GPU goes, both consoles will be able to support Ray-Tracing (it blew my mind too), so with the only big gap in the GPU section being the Xbox Series S' Custom AMD Radeon RDNA 4 Teraflops to Xbox Series X's Custom AMD Radeon RDNA Navi 12 Teraflops, the differences come to light with the video output of both consoles. Xbox Series X will have 4K Native (and up to 8K support) at 120fps, while the Xbox Series S will have 4K support through upscaling and cap at 1440p, 120fps.

However, if you're one of the many frustrated Call of Duty: Warzone players who face the daily challenges of filling your hard drive to its breaking point with updates, then the Xbox Series S has one big downside. The storage space of the Xbox Series X is 1 TB NVMe SSD but compared to the Xbox Series S, you're only getting 512GB NVME SSD. Warzone players - and while we're at it, bring the No Man's Sky players over here too - I feel for you.

To wrap it all up, both consoles will offer Project xCloud as a streaming service, both will be backward compatible with Xbox 360 and Xbox One games, and both CPUs will include the 8x Zen 2 Cores at 3.6-3.8GHz.

Have a look at the full specs below:



The key difference out of all of this actually seems to be where the Xbox Series S' limitations rest in the video output, GPU, and disc drive sections. Other than that, it's impressive where both consoles match up and offer almost similar experiences for such drastically different price points (crucial testing may be needed to draw a definite conclusion), but of course, that will come down to the main reason for Xbox Series S' existence: an all-digital, budget-friendly console for the casual gamer in mind.

Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S launch on November 10th, 2020, with pre-orders starting on September 22nd, 2020.