The research
- Xbox Series X vs. Xbox Series S: What’s the difference?
- Why should you get an Xbox Series X|S?
- The Xbox Series Controller
- Xbox Game Pass
- What to look forward to
- Frequently asked questions
Xbox Series X vs. Xbox Series S: What’s the difference?
The Xbox Series X and Series S offer a lot of the same experiences. But with a big 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.
- 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. Officially licensed memory cards (from Seagate and Western Digital) typically retail for $80 for 512 GB, $150 for 1 TB, and $250 for 2 TB. However, both the Series X and Series S still support external USB drives like the Xbox One did, and any Xbox One–formatted drive will work right away on either newer 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 and it’s designed to be set vertically or horizontally.
Why should you get an Xbox Series X|S?
If you don’t own a current-generation console and want to play new releases, it’s probably time to upgrade. Many of the biggest games are now skipping the Xbox One and PlayStation 5. Recent games like EA Sports College Football 25 and upcoming titles, including Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Avowed, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and Monster Hunter Wilds are skipping older consoles completely.
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. 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. Quick Resume occasionally causes problems with online games, though.
Games and saves on an Xbox Series X or Xbox Series S are stored on internal NVMe storage, which is super fast, providing 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. 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.
A fast, familiar user interface
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.
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The Xbox Series Controller
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
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.
Xbox Game Pass Core replaced Xbox Live in the fall of 2023. For $10, Game Pass Core allows you to play (non-free-to-play) games online with other players; you also receive access to a collection of around 30 games, which sees occasional removals and additions. We don’t think Game Pass Core is a great deal, but if you want to play online, it’s the minimum required subscription.
Game Pass for Console, available only to existing subscribers of Xbox Game Pass, offers access to a library of hundreds of games. However, online multiplayer isn’t included with the service, and although you get access to most of Xbox’s first-party titles, it no longer receives “Day One” game releases (and Xbox isn’t saying how long the wait will be for those games to arrive). For existing Game Pass for Console subscribers, the monthly price is $11, but if you don’t already have it, you can’t get it.
PC Game Pass doesn’t include multiplayer, because PC gamers don’t pay for that privilege. Otherwise, it offers the best stuff about Game Pass—namely, Day One game releases and a huge library of games with frequent additions—and it includes access to the EA Play library, all for $12 a month. Call of Duty games, including last year’s Modern Warfare 3 and this fall’s Black Ops 6, are and will be included in the higher subscription tiers of Game Pass, including PC Game Pass.
For $20 a month, Game Pass Ultimate includes every benefit of the service: online play, a huge library of games from all of Xbox’s divisions (including Bethesda, Blizzard, and Activision), a library of games from publisher EA Games that includes recent Madden, EA Sports FC, and more titles, plus Day One access to all of Xbox’s owned-studio releases and various third-party and independent games.
We acknowledge that this is all extremely confusing. 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 saw a number of bigger-budget day one releases in 2023, including Exoprimal, Lies of P, and many more. All of Microsoft’s first-party games—that is, games paid for or owned by Xbox—arrive on Game Pass Ultimate (and PC 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. Xbox recently announced that this fall’s Call of Duty game, Black Ops 6, will also arrive on the service on day one, as will 2025’s Doom: The Dark Ages.
If getting access to big new games on release day via Game Pass is important to you, or if you want access to popular sports titles from Electronic Arts, Game Pass Ultimate makes sense. If you just want access to a big library of rotating titles but brand-new releases aren’t important to you, go with Game Pass for Console for a little less per month. If you play games primarily on PC, PC Game Pass is the best deal of the bunch.
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.
Price | Online multiplayer access | Game Pass game library on console | Game Pass game library on PC | Day One releases | Cloud gaming access | |
Xbox Game Pass Core (formerly Xbox Live Gold) | $10 (monthly) $75 (annual) | ✓ | (Limited) | |||
Xbox Game Pass Standard | $15 (monthly) | ✓ | Large library of non-day one releases | (Limited) | ||
PC Game Pass | $12 (monthly) $30 (three month) | n/a | ✓ | ✓ | ||
Game Pass Ultimate | $20 (monthly) $30–$45 (three month) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Xbox offers a lot of monthly-plan options. Game Pass Ultimate is an excellent value for anyone who would pay for online multiplayer access.
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.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.
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What to look forward to
On October 15, Microsoft is releasing two new Xbox Series X models and one new Xbox Series S version. For would-be Series X owners, you’ll be able to buy a new “All Digital” Robot White Xbox Series X console, which has 1 TB of internal storage and no disc drive for $450. If more storage and a disc drive are important to you, Microsoft is also introducing a 2 TB Galaxy Black console for $600. For Series S buyers, Microsoft is introducing a 1 TB version of the original Robot White console for $350. None of these consoles will offer a performance increase or otherwise differ from existing versions of the Xbox Series X and Series S.
Frequently asked questions
How much do the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S cost?
The Xbox Series X is $500, and can often be found with an included game like Diablo 4. That price has fluctuated depending on various deals available at online retailers. The Xbox Series S, meanwhile, starts at $300 for the 512 GB version of the console and $350 for the black 1 TB version, though we often see the 512 GB model for much less.
Are the Xbox Series X and S backwards-compatible?
Other than Xbox One Kinect-based titles, the Xbox Series X and S are compatible with every Xbox One title, and hundreds of Xbox 360 titles are also available. Every Xbox One and 360 title features enhancements on Xbox Series X and S, though many have more pronounced improvements to frame rate and resolution.
Do the Xbox Series X and Series S support 4K? What about 4K/UHD Blu-ray?
Both the Series X and Series S support 4K resolutions, and video apps such as Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, and Netflix can play back 4K titles (with HDR). However, the Series S is not designed to play games at 4K.
The Series X has a UHD Blu-ray drive, which can play both standard Blu-rays and UHD discs. It supports Dolby Vision in video apps such as Netflix and Vudu, but it does not support Dolby Vision for UHD discs. The Series S does not have a disc drive, so it can’t play Blu-ray discs.
Do the Xbox Series X and S support variable refresh rate?
Xbox Series X and Series S offer fully HDMI 2.1 compliant variable refresh rate support with low frame rate compensation, or LFC, which allows support of refresh rates below 48Hz.
Do I need a new HDMI cable?
The Xbox Series X comes with an HDMI 2.1 cable, and you should use it. HDMI 2.1 is required for features such as 4K 120 Hz visuals along with HDR. If you attempt to use a non–HDMI 2.1 certified cable with either console, you might experience problems such as a blinking black screen or even no signal at all.
Will my old Xbox accessories work?
Every officially licensed Xbox One controller will work with the Xbox Series X and S, and most accessories have also been updated to support the newer consoles. We recommend Google searching for specific devices and their supported status on the Series X|S, however.
Do the Xbox Series X and Series S support HDMI-CEC?
The Series X and Series S both offer support for HDMI-CEC with supported televisions and other AV equipment, which includes the ability to turn displays on or off or to be turned on when their respective video input is selected on supported TVs, as well as to control the volume of an attached HDMI-CEC audio device.
Do the Xbox Series X and Series S support Bluetooth?
The Series X and Series S do not support Bluetooth connectivity, though their controllers do support Bluetooth for PC or phone play.
Do the Xbox Series X and Series S support Wi-Fi 6?
The Series X and Series S support gigabit LAN connections and 802.11g/n/ac wireless connectivity but do not support Wi-Fi 6.
Do the Xbox Series X and Series S support Dolby Vision?
The Xbox Series X and Series S both support Dolby Vision in compatible apps, including Disney+, Netflix, Vudu, and others, and in games on supported televisions, including at up to 120 Hz. Some games can use Xbox’s AutoHDR feature to output in Dolby Vision, while other games natively support the feature. However, the Xbox Series X does not support Dolby Vision for UHD Blu-ray playback.
Do the Xbox Series X and Series S support Dolby Atmos or DTS:X?
Out of the box, the Xbox Series X and Series S both support Dolby Atmos for home theaters, in compatible televisions and home theater receivers. Dolby Atmos for headphones requires a license; many headsets that support Atmos include a license, but if yours does not, you can buy one separately. DTS:X and DTS Headphone:X are supported through the DTS Sound Unbound app on both the Series X and Series S consoles.