Xbox Series S is strong, and teraflops are BS. Is Xbox Series S actually better than XOne X?

In the case of the GPU – likely the most interesting element of the console – it seems on paper that One X is stronger – it has more teraflops and computing units, after all. In a nutshell, teraflops don't indicate the actual performance of the hardware – TFLOP is just a unit for determining the number of floating-point calculations per second.

We don't expect that the new consoles will change our lives, but it's cool they're already here.

The number of TFLOPS can vary even within a single graphics card in different versions (e.g. an RTX 2060 from Palit may have a completely different number of TFLOPS than an RTX 2060 from Zotac due to different core timing of both units). It's a coefficient of just 2 elements: core clock and number of stream processors, which do not fully reflect the potential of a GPU. A good example of how misleading this figure can be is the performance gap between AMD and Nvidia GPUs. The flagship Radeon R9 Fury X from a few years ago had 9.6 TFLOPS on paper, and in games, it performed worse than theoretically much weaker GTX 1070 (6.5 TFLOPS).

As you can see, teraflops are an inaccurate indicator of the power of graphics, because it actually comes down to many more factors, such as memory bandwidth, different architecture, etc. Moreover, we cannot compare these numbers in different generations of cards, so we can confidently assume that the graphics quality (not considering resolution) on Xbox Series S should not be inferior to that of XOne X, and will likely be better. It's also worth mentioning that Microsoft promises (to an unspecified extent) support for ray tracing, i.e. technology unavailable on the old generation and associated with the top-of-the-line graphics cards in personal computers.

It's still unclear how ray tracing will work on new generation consoles.

The amount and speed of RAM should also not have a negative impact on the performance of Xbox Series S, as it's equipped with GDDR6 memory, characterized by higher throughput than GDDR5. The slightly lower RAM speed may be of concern, as its amount is practically the same, and it's worth mentioning that games on Series S are supposed to run in 1440p or 1080p, and most of the titles on One X run in 4K, which is much more demanding. So it seems that in case of playing in Full HD or 1440p such amount of memory should be enough and allow for better performance than in case of One X.