Metro studio says Xbox Series S’s GPU ‘presents challenges’ for its future games

Metro studio 4A Games has said that the relatively low Xbox Series S GPU performance “presents challenges” when it comes to developing its future games.

4A Games is currently working on enhanced Xbox Series X/S, PS5 and PC versions of Metro Exodus, which are scheduled for release in 2021.

It said this week that all of the new console versions offer full ray traced lighting and 60FPS, with the Series X and PS5 versions running at 4K and the Series S version targeting 1080p.

While 4A Games currently has “a compromise solution” to overcome the lower GPU performance of the Xbox Series S, chief technical officer Oleksandr Shyshkovtsov told Wccftech the GPU was problematic for its future games due to the nature of the studio’s existing renderer.

“The RAM is not an issue for us (currently), but GPU performance presents challenges for future titles,” he said. “Our current renderer is designed for high spatial and temporal resolution (read: 4K @ 60 fps). It is stochastic by nature.

“Dropping any of those would require us to do more expensive calculations dropping performance even further. We have a compromise solution right now, but I am not satisfied with it yet.”

4A Games was acquired by Halo: Anniversary and World War Z studio Saber Interactive, a subsidiary of Embracer Group, in August 2020.

As well as the new versions of Metro Exodus, 4A Games is currently working on the next entry in the Metro series and a new AAA IP.

In a November interview with Digital Foundry, Xbox system architect Andrew Goossen claimed that Xbox Series S would “advance the generation rather than hold it back.”

“I’ve read a lot of question on the internet, like, why isn’t Microsoft going to continue Xbox One X as the low-end machine,” he said.

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“Well, one thing is that it would last a long time through the generation and we felt that the new generation is defined by aspects such as the Xbox Velocity Architecture, and graphics features such as variable rate shading and ray tracing and the 4x processing performance boost on the CPU.

“And so we wanted to make sure that there was an entry level at the right price-point so that we could really advance the generation rather than hold it back,” Goossen continued. “I’ve heard that Series S is going to hold back the next generation but I actually see Series S advancing it because by doing Series S we’ll have more games written to the characteristics of the next generation.”

Xbox boss Phil Spencer has said he expects Series S to outsell Series X over the course of the generation, and has suggested Microsoft is already working on future Xbox Series console iterations.