Choosing the Right Xbox: Series X or Series S

The Xbox Series X and Series S offer a lot of the same experiences. But with a $200 price difference come some legitimate differences in their capabilities.

• Game selection and disc drive: The Series X and Series S can play the same new games, and both are backward compatible, which means they’re capable of playing virtually any game that you could play on an Xbox One (which, in turn, encompasses hundreds of Xbox 360 games and a handful of original-Xbox games). The Series S, however, doesn’t have a disc drive and therefore can’t play physical games.
• Resolution: Both the Series X and Series S can output a 4K video signal, so watching videos on a 4K TV should be the same on either machine. But if you plan to play games on a 4K display, you should choose the Series X. The Series X is designed for games with resolutions of up to 4K, while the Series S has less-powerful graphics hardware designed more for 1080p and sometimes 1440p visuals.
• Graphics-quality support: The Series X and Series S have the same basic graphics capabilities, including support for variable refresh rate, variable rate shading, and ray-traced visuals, though some games have already omitted ray tracing if you’re playing on a Series S.
• Base storage: While the Series X includes a 1 TB storage drive, which offers about 800 GB of usable space, the Series S has a 512 GB drive with about 360 GB of usable space.
• Expandable storage: Both the Series X and Series S include a slot that allows for expandable storage in the form of cards using the CFexpress connection standard. The only officially licensed memory cards (from Seagate) typically retail for $140 for 512 GB, $185 for 1 TB, and $360 for 2 TB. However, both the Series X and Series S still support external USB drives, as the Xbox One does, and any Xbox One–formatted drive will work right away on either new console.
• Size: The Xbox Series X is a tall block measuring about 12 inches tall and approximately 6 by 6 inches at the base. The Series S, meanwhile, is 11 by 5.9 by 2.6 inches—it’s the smallest Xbox ever, and it’s designed to be set vertically or horizontally.

If you don’t own a new console and want to play major new releases, it’s time to upgrade. Support for the Xbox One console is ending, and some of the biggest games of the year, including the high-profile Dead Space and Resident Evil 4 remakes, skipped that machine. Even major Xbox exclusives such as Starfield (video) and Forza Motorsport are Xbox Series X|S exclusives.

Setup

Booting up the Xbox Series X or the Xbox Series S for the first time makes it immediately apparent how much things have changed. New Xbox consoles allow you to handle most of the process via your Android phone or iPhone and the newest version of the Xbox app, and you can even restore the settings, preferences, and game files from your existing console and cloud storage. The process takes just a few minutes, start to finish.

Load times

The most immediately obvious improvements in the Series X and Series S are in speed, as they create a snappier, speedy experience from top to bottom. And these changes are evident even before you make it to the console dashboard: Both the Series X and Series S take approximately nine seconds to boot from an unpowered, unplugged state to the console home screen, and returning from standby mode is only a couple of seconds faster.

Because of those fast boot times, we recommend that you use either console’s enhanced power-saving settings, which allow the machine to draw a fraction of the power it would require on normal settings while on standby. The Xbox settings screen conveniently demonstrates the console’s changes in power usage depending on your settings.

We also recommend using the power-saving modes partly because of another Xbox Series X|S feature: Quick Resume. This feature creates saved states for the games you’re playing, allowing you to load back into supported games exactly where you last were, even if you’ve turned off (or unplugged) your console. Quick Resume has gotten better and better over the past year, and the only games it seems to cause issues in are always-online titles that rely on a server connection. I’ve occasionally been surprised to find games that I haven’t played in weeks or even months waiting to be quickly resumed, and I’ve been able to pop back into each game exactly where I left off.

Games and saves on an Xbox Series X or Xbox Series S are stored on hardware based on NVMe storage. This tech contributes to some of the most obvious improvements to the overall user experience and gaming experience on this new console generation, helping to produce a night-and-day difference in console startup, game boot-ups, and in-game load times.

If you’re coming from a previous-generation console, the differences in responsiveness and speed will be immediately apparent. In addition to the impressively fast boot times, switching apps is notably fast, and they load almost instantly (depending in part on your internet connection). If you’ve been using an Xbox One for years, the difference is, to be blunt, shocking—think of it like buying your first new phone in seven years. It’s that level of improvement.

Software improvements

Though the interface in the Xbox Series X|S is much faster, it’s very similar to that of the Xbox One. The Xbox Series X|S consoles offer full external-storage support, game-level support and customization for features like Auto HDR and FPS Boost, and robust variable refresh rate support (using low frame-rate compensation, in the best console implementation of this feature that we’ve seen). We also appreciate features likes automatic night mode, which adjusts the interface colors depending on the time of day and even reduces the brightness output of the console and its status lights, as well as little things like bonus animated dashboard backgrounds, including a special Xbox 20th-anniversary theme that’s enabled when you connect a limited-edition 20th-anniversary controller to your console.

Better graphics on old games, great graphics on new games

The Series X and Series S are both more graphically powerful than previous consoles in a variety of ways. In most titles, you can expect higher resolutions, higher frame rates, and more detailed characters and environments compared with the same games on the Xbox One or the PlayStation 4, all with better image quality. Effects should also be more pronounced and sophisticated, as the graphics hardware in these consoles can pull off greater amounts of fancy tricks such as smoke and fog with physical properties and lighting that creates shadows and reflections more like you’d find in the real world.

The Series X and Series S (and the PlayStation 5) support hardware-accelerated ray tracing, which allows for much more sophisticated visual effects and lighting. Note, however, that even though both consoles support ray tracing, those effects are absent in many games on the Series S. Forza Motorsport is a great example of both—it features ray traced reflections and shadows on the Xbox Series X, but these features aren’t available on the Xbox Series S.

The Series X and Series S also have similar, powerful CPUs—more than four times as powerful as the Xbox One and PS4. This opens the door to more sophisticated character and game behaviors, and just more stuff on screen at any given moment. The biggest improvements are most apparent in frame rates, which should hit 60 frames per second much more often than on the Xbox One or PS4, resulting in smoother-feeling and smoother-playing games. And when games can’t maintain consistent frame rates, support for variable refresh rates should help keep those games from feeling unresponsive. Examples in this regard include Dead Island 2, Diablo 4, and Elden Ring, all of which offer 60 fps modes on the Series X and Series S, something you can’t get on the Xbox One.

A number of titles originally released for the Xbox One have received frame-rate improvements on the Xbox Series X|S; Gears 5, the entirety of Halo: The Master Chief Collection, and Ori and the Will of the Wisps have all received 120 fps updates for the two new consoles. Controls also feel more responsive, in part because the Xbox team has rewritten the software behind its controllers with a feature called Dynamic Latency Input.

You can still play your old games—and they’ll look better

For players with an existing library of Xbox software, the Series X and Series S both offer nearly blanket backward compatibility, so they can run almost the entire collection of Xbox One–compatible software, which in turn includes hundreds of Xbox 360 and original-Xbox games. (The exception is Kinect software and hardware. None of that will work on either new console.) What’s more, every Xbox One–compatible piece of software runs and looks better on the Series X and the Series S than it did on previous-generation consoles. The Auto HDR feature, which uses an algorithm to tweak a game’s picture to take advantage of modern televisions’ ability to show brighter images with better contrast, helps to produce a beautiful new sense of vibrance in games like Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2. In a few games, this feature results in image quality that looks a little funny, but you can disable it on a per-game basis.

Microsoft also offers, for selected titles, FPS Boost, which is a proprietary software technique that allows the Xbox Series X|S consoles to effectively double the targeted frame rate of backward-compatible games without the need for official patches from the original game developer. For some games, this means they’ll run at 60 fps (or thereabouts) for the first time on consoles. For others, it means 120 fps on supported televisions. Even a number of Xbox 360 games (a console that was released in 2005 and ended support in 2014!) have received improvements, including a 4K and 60 fps update for Fallout 3.

Even when Microsoft isn’t delivering improvements at a system level, many game developers have continued to patch older titles with improvements for these new systems. And Xbox’s Smart Delivery feature seamlessly ensures that you’ll play the best version of a game available to you—which sounds obvious but unfortunately is not, as PlayStation multiplatform releases now routinely maintain separate installations of PS4 and PS5 versions.

The Xbox Series consoles come with a slightly reworked controller, which features a share button in the middle below the jewel icon, and textured grips and triggers. It’s an evolution of a great controller design, but if you have older Xbox One pads, don’t worry. Every Xbox One accessory released since 2013 (with the notable exception of the Kinect) works with both the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S. Every first- and third-party controller, every fight stick, every driving wheel, every media remote, and every already formatted storage device is compatible with the newer consoles. Those controllers need a firmware update, however. After the update, previous-generation controllers also gain improved latency with the new consoles.

Storage

The internal storage of your Series X or Series S could fill up quickly if you download and play a lot of games and don’t want to delete and redownload them. The Series X’s drive, labeled as 1 TB, has 802 GB of available storage space at launch, accounting for both the actual formatted size of the drive and the system files and cache space allocated to the console’s operating system. The Series S, meanwhile, ships with 364 GB of available free space, and a modern Call of Duty could take up more than half of that.

The only add-on storage option that can run Series X|S–exclusive software directly is an officially licensed Western Digital or Seagate Storage Expansion Card. These are just as speedy as the consoles’ internal storage, but that performance comes at a cost: The 1 TB option currently has a retail price of $145; 512 GB and 2 TB options are also available. Unlike the PlayStation 5, the Xbox Series X|S consoles do not allow you to install a standard PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive, but these expansion cards slot easily into the back of your console with no tools required.

If you’re willing to park your less-played games so you don’t have to redownload them, we’d recommend external solid-state drives. You can’t play current-generation games from an external drive, but they can be quickly copied to or from an external SSD to your console. We like our portable SSD pick, the Samsung T7 Shield, but you could also use a plain SSD attached via a USB-to-SATA cable. Digital Foundry has reported that backward-compatible games load almost as fast on an external SSD. USB hard drives like the Toshiba Canvio Flex are the most affordable option, but load times on last-generation games will be only somewhat better than on the Xbox One, and you can’t play Series X|S software on them.

Any drives you’re already using with an Xbox One console will work on your Series X or Series S. Plug them in, and any Xbox One, Xbox 360, or original-Xbox games you have installed on them will appear automatically and be playable, barring any required updates.

Xbox Game Pass (and Xbox Live)

An Xbox Game Pass subscription provides access to a huge library of games, from indie titles to major, full-priced releases. It’s the best deal in video gaming, but it can be a little confusing to know which tier to subscribe to for the features you want.

In September 2023, Xbox Live Gold, which was required for multiplayer access on Xbox, became Xbox Game Pass Core. In addition to online multiplayer, for $10 a month you’ll also receive access to a collection of 25 games, which occasionally sees removals and additions.

Xbox Game Pass (non-Core), doesn’t include access to online multiplayer, but the $11-per-month subscription gets you unlimited access to Xbox’s first-party titles and a huge number of third party and independent games as well.

Then there’s PC Game Pass, which doesn’t include multiplayer, because PC gamers don’t pay for that privilege. Otherwise, it’s all the great stuff about Game Pass, and it includes access to the EA Play library, all for $10 a month.

Then, finally, there’s Game Pass Ultimate, which for $17 a month includes online multiplayer access, Xbox and PC Game Pass, and also EA Play, which adds dozens of games from Electronic Arts, including additional recent titles. This is all extremely confusing, but we recommend Game Pass Ultimate unless you plan on buying dozens of new games every year (and maybe even if you are). Game Pass is a trove of hidden gems, providing access to many higher-profile, well-received indies, and has seen a number of bigger-budget day one releases in 2023, including Exoprimal, Lies of P, and many more. But all of Microsoft’s first-party games—that is, games paid for or owned by Xbox—arrive on Game Pass the same day they launch. This means membership gives you immediate access to every Forza title, every Gears of War game, every Halo title, and more. It also includes games from Bethesda Studios, the owners of The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Doom, and dozens of other games and franchises, which Xbox acquired in 2021. We’re not sure whether this same policy will apply to games from the recently acquired Activision-Blizzard, the publisher of games like World of Warcraft, Diablo 4, Call of Duty, and more. We expect to learn more in 2024.

Game Pass also includes a streaming component, which allows subscribers to stream any game on the service to Android and iOS devices and through browsers like Chrome and Safari. And current Xbox One owners can play the Series X versions of games like Halo Infinite and Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) via cloud streaming.

However, it’s important to keep an eye on the games that are coming to Game Pass while you’re subscribed, as there have been periods where fewer high-profile games come to or debut on the service. Numerous high-profile Game Pass titles, including Redfall and Starfield, were delayed from 2022 to 2023. Game Pass is a great deal as long as there are things coming that you’re interested in playing—if nothing intriguing is on the horizon, and you haven’t paid for months in advance, it makes sense to cancel your subscription until you see games you’d like to play.

This article was edited by Caitlin McGarry and Signe Brewster.