Infinity Ward dev: Xbox Series S could be ‘bottleneck’ for next-gen development

Earlier this week, Microsoft officially announced their lower-performing next-generation console called the Xbox Series S.

The company announced that the Xbox Series S will be perform lower than that of the Xbox Series X as it’s an all digital console and priced at $299.

As part of the announcement, Microsoft presented the specifications for the Xbox Series S console.

Here’s the specifications, compared to the Xbox Series X:

The biggest differences developers have instantly noticed is the CPU clock speed of 3.4GHz and the GPU of only 4 TFLOPS compared to the 12 TFLOPS of the Xbox Series X.

Developers have stated online that the fear this could be a potential development hurdle console when games completely switch over to being ‘next-gen’ only developed. Right now, majority of 3rd party devs are making games for the PC, PS4, Xbox One family, alongside Xbox Series X, S, and PS5.

Infinity Ward’s Designer says on Twitter that the Xbox Series S could end up being a bottleneck for development when next-gen only games start to be developed, as they’ll have to develop for a console with only 4TFLOPS. PS5 has around 10TFLOPS of power in its GPU.

It really is, but I can't stop thinking about the fact that they're releasing a lower spec console that will serve as a bottleneck ( granted transition into next gen is always bottlenecked by last gen for awhile )

— David Mickner (@DavidMickner) September 8, 2020

The first Call of Duty game to hit next-gen consoles will be Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. The game is expected to be ‘true 4K’ on PS5 and Xbox Series X with up to 120FPS play for those consoles.

Treyarch has not stated what the performance will be like for the Xbox Series S console.