Xbox Series X: What do game developers say about next-gen? We asked several for their thoughts.

We knew with the next generation of Xbox, we needed to rethink and revolutionize the traditional console architecture to deliver consistent, reliable, and sustained performance never before seen in the living room with no compromises. Whereas past console generations have primarily been defined by increases in graphics innovation and performance, game developers' creative visions have become increasingly constrained by technical limitations such as I/O performance. With Xbox One X, we reached the upper limits of performance in traditional rotational drives. To unlock the creativity of developers to create transformative gaming experiences, we knew we needed to also invest in SSD level I/O speeds and innovation.This became the foundation for the Xbox Velocity Architecture, which comprises our custom-designed NVME SSD, a custom dedicated hardware decompression block, our new DirectStorage API which provides developers with direct low-level access to the NVME controller, and our innovative Sampler Feedback Streaming solution which acts as a multiplier of the physical memory in the console. The Xbox Velocity Architecture was designed to be the ultimate solution for game asset streaming, delivering a level of performance well beyond the raw specifications of the hardware, allowing developers to virtually eliminate loading times and enabling them to deliver even larger and more immersive, dynamic, living worlds for gamers to explore and enjoy."

The most exciting thing for me is the addition of an SSD and the custom hardware surrounding it to help get data into memory faster. This is not only going to allow for better streaming and load times but also make it easier to work with larger data sets that don't easily fit into memory. The addition of hardware ray tracing is also super exciting, but it's how it can be used outside of graphics that will enable the biggest changes.I can already see potential uses for it in games like The Long Dark, where we would be able to simulate physically accurate weather and wind by sending some rays into the world and then having the audio and physics change dynamically based on where the snow is accumulating or melting. These sorts of things are going to allow some really immersive experiences that weren't easily achievable before.

Playing games at a high refresh rate, at those crazy resolutions, is the next big thing in gaming. Anyone that played Ori and the Will of the Wisps in high resolution in 120 hertz will know what I mean. Previously this was only something that PC enthusiasts spending thousands of dollars on their machines would be able to experience. Bringing this kind of performance and quality to the general public is very exciting to me, and I think that will be the true next-gen leap we've all been waiting for.

If you're in the business of making games, you're always excited about new hardware, and what it means for game development. First and foremost, the Xbox Series X is a genuine and significant boost in performance from the Xbox One. We saw how important both frame-rate and resolution were with the previous generation, so it's so exciting to be able to deliver 4K gaming at 60 frames per second on a console. Something that the Xbox One X offered was the ability for players to choose between resolutions and framerates, and we think giving gamers even more choice in this regard will be a good thing. The increased processing power means we will not only be able to offer silky-smooth gameplay for things like long-range ballistic mechanics with pinpoint accuracy, but we can actually take that gameplay up a level in complexity.Hardware-accelerated ray tracing is also a very welcome feature. Not only does it allow us to take players to environments that are that more realistic and dynamic, but ray tracing hardware can do more than just rendering! For example, we can do incredible things with the acoustics to enhance realism. Modeling realistic sound occlusion for AI's hearing in real-time, for example, is an incredibly useful feature for creating stealth games.The SSD storage speed then lets us take those beautiful realistic environments and make them load in a flash. And we're talking about bigger environments than the ones we could create on Xbox One.Finding new things to stream is an important part of this generation, and animation streaming is a game-changer for motion capture. Now we can support detailed motion capture on a much wider scale, like non-player characters simply doing their thing in the background. Instead of all enemy NPCs moving in an identical way, for example, the SSD storage speed means we can offer many unique motion-captured animations – and given we own Audiomotion, Europe's leading motion capture studio, it's something we'll be very keen to do.

We have come to expect generational leaps in CPU, GPU, and memory performance with each generation. Xbox Series X more than delivers against these expectations. As a game developer, one of the most exciting improvements that far exceeds expectations is the massive I/O improvements on Xbox Series X. In the current generation, as the fidelity and size of our worlds increased, we have seen download times and install sizes grow and increasing runtime I/O demands, which have made it challenging to maintain load-times expectations and meet world streaming demands without detail loss. The Xbox Series X has been holistically designed to directly address this challenge.With the Xbox Series X, out of the gate, we reduced our load-times by more than 4x without any code changes. With the new DirectStorage APIs and new hardware decompression, we can further improve I/O performance and reduce CPU overhead, both of which are essential to achieve fast loading. As we look to the future, the Xbox Series X's Sampler Feedback for Streaming (SFS) is a game-changer for how we think about world streaming and visual level of detail. We will be exploring how we can use it in future titles to both increase the texture detail in our game beyond what we can fit into memory, as well as reduce load times further by increasing on-demand loading to just before we need it, instead of pre-loading everything up-front as we would use a more traditional 'level loading' approach.

Ray-tracing will allow for more realistic and flexible art direction. There's a lot of research around raytracing that can be leveraged here that could lead to some very interesting concepts. Reflections, soft shadows, refraction, transparency. But all these operations have a cost. Raytracing hardware allows us to do some interesting things, but usually, production raytracers can take quite some time to converge to a reasonable image. The limit on samples per pixel means that there has been an interesting race to determine who can write an efficient denoiser. I'm interested to see what this new tech will lead to in terms of new research being done. Denoiser's are one interesting avenue, but maybe it will allow developers to write their own light mappers, or pre-render cinematics more effectively.What does it mean for game graphics? It means that developers are creating new ideas on how to use this tech, pushing the boundaries in a different direction than it's been pushed before.Processing power is always useful to allow developers to create more expansive worlds, more complex interactions, and to improve our ability to include more content into our games. It can also enable developers to spend less time optimizing and spend more time creating. Chip efficiency is also a big deal when it comes to the power wall. There comes a limit to how fast you can clock a CPU and how small you can make your transistors if operations require a lot of energy, then your chip needs more cooling to mitigate the damage. As a result, if you can reduce power consumption, you can increase the number of transistors you can fit on a chip. If you can reduce the cost of executing instructions, then you can increase your overall clock rate while maintaining your heat output. More instructions equal more "good."Hard drives have always been a hard constraint that developers have to deal with. SSDs provide some interesting benefits such as removing the necessity for seek times, which might provide flexibility in how you would pack data on disk. Of course, read times are also improved. SSDs can provide data significantly faster than HDDs can. This will help mitigate loading screens and improving our ability to stream large worlds more efficiently.