Xbox Series X Velocity Architecture Will 'Greatly Help' Open World Games, According to Dev - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 07 February 2021 / 5,733 Views
Co-founder of CBE Software Jan Kavan speaking with GamingBolt in an interview says the Xbox Series X Velocity Architecture will "greatly help" open world and larger games.
"This will greatly help large games – especially open world – because streaming is always an issue to deal with," Kavan said.
"It’s not only about reading from SSD, but also providing the assets for the game. So yes, having hardware-level decompression and asset preprocessing might bring in a very interesting point for the overall smoothness."
CBE Software is the developer of the psychological horror game, Someday You’ll Return. It is out now for PC and will launch for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 later this year.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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I dunno. It's clear that the new SSDs are a massive improvement for developers, but I'm still skeptical as to how that'll effect open world games for the players. Breath of the Wild was arguably one of the most open games of all time, and that was running off a blu ray disk at like 9MB/s on the Wii U.
Think when you had to go from the open world to a mini temple, you would have no loading and just seamlessly go in, plus devs use a lot of techniques to hide things in open worlds in this gen and back which results in the worlds being a bit more barren than they should. Imagine a world like Breath of the Wild but beaming with life. More diversity of architecture in city like open worlds and possibly no loading when entering buildings inside said open world. And imagine not realising when you move from gameplay to cut scene and also fast travel without any loading. Plus no constricted places or big mountain barriers or long elevators or hallways.
@Eagle, that would be nice however its not entirely necessary. BOTW world is incredible and you cannot even tell the flaws in it, as you are emotionally involved with the atmosphere of the world.
A good dev doesnt need state of the art tech to make good games. Nintendo clearly proves this gen by gen. In saying all that, it would be nice to have less limitations, but it will always come down to the devs delivering.
@Eagle, I can imagine, however what makes games like BOTW so great is the focus away from visuals. I guess what i mean is, if companies go out of there way to focus on visusls, than there is less focus being spent on gameplay etc. Most Nintendo games are full focus on how the games play rather than how they look.
Yep that is what we expect.
I think this Architecture will be a Milestone for Consoles! Im really excited to get it this year. my first 2 Games will be Halo Infinite and Forza Motorsport 8
Yes, this time those machines are no jokes :) I am really happy about it too. I'm so pumped to see that Halo Infinite reveal in July :) First game from Microsoft made for the Xbox One series X from the start! My kids will enjoy the "downgraded" version on their Xbox One too ;-)
The Playstation 5 chasing 36CU's falls in line with a Radeon RX 5600XT/RX 5700/RX 480/RX 580 which is mid-range, but does push out clockrates to make up for that.
The Xbox Series X does take things a little further than that, but it's CU count will fall short of the R9 Fury from 2015 or Vega 56.
Granted RDNA2 is more efficient than those GPU's listed... However AMD will be releasing big Navi @ possibly 80CU (Rumors, grain of salt) and nVidia's Ampere.
The next-gen consoles are using mid-range GPU's again, not to mention how AMD isn't really competitive in the high-end anyway...
The CPU's and storage take home the largest generational improvements, which is what is truly exciting for simulation quality.
I would imagine for 10th gen there will be a bigger emphasis on GPU capability again.
But how much better with the gpu can you get @Pemalite? I mean at 4k 60Hz, what more would you need? 120Hz or 8k? I'm not that savy on tech but wouldn't having better CPUs help video games more than GPUs? Like The Last of Us part 2 looks like a movie already and then we have all the next gen stuff. Of course with the advancement in tech, the mid-range by gen 10th be so damn powerful for GPUs that you shouldn't really need high end ones?
@Permalite, different generations. That's like saying 6 fx6300 cores at 3.5ghz is the same as 6 Ryzen 3 cores at 3.5ghz.
@Eagle367 The 8th generations biggest issue was it's CPU capabilities which held back simulation quality, that issue has been resolved entirely with the 9th gen and AMD's capable Ryzen CPU's.
The issue is...
We can make games that are "movie quality" in 2020 on the Playstation 4, but that is all baked stuff, that is lighting, shadowing and smaller details that are static, not moving and often just an added detailing in the texture work... Earlier on in a console generation most developers use the extra processing to introduce dynamic effects, we saw it with the 7th gen, 8th gen and we will see it with the 9th gen, but over time there is a need to improve visuals, so some of the rendering pipeline becomes static.
The other interesting part is that, when developers start leveraging dynamic effects on a next-gen console... They will continue to port those games to the previous generation, but typically won't invest into baking those details again, so it will seem like there is a regression in graphics for the older devices, when that is not actually the case.
The CPU and GPU are both as important as each other, they are specialized units which are specialized at handling different tasks. I.E. CPU's with complex serial processing and GPU's with simpler parallel processing.
High-end GPU's by the time 10th generation roll around will likely be extremely proficient at Ray Tracing, which is where the industry has been heading for decades... And by the 11th gen I wouldn't be surprised if games ditched rasterization for the most part, there is tons of room for improvement.
@ArchangelMadzz
The difference between Ryzen and the FX is that Ryzen is an entirely new, built-from the ground up architecture with completely different design philosophies and vastly superior IPC and power characteristics.
RDNA featured in the RX 5000 series is actually based on Graphics Core Next, it even uses the same instruction set, it wouldn't be inaccurate to say that AMD used Graphics Core Next and simply bolted RDNA features to it in order to have a viable product for a release window... AMD's GPU's are also very modular in their design which allows such flexibility.
Fact is, the console GPU's featured in next-gen are around the same size and complexity as current AMD GPU's which fall around the mid-range category and will be pushed downwards in the hierarchy once AMD releases Big Navi and nVidia pushes our Ampere.
Just so I'm not misrepresenting you.
You think the PS5 GPU will resemble the RX 580?
@ArchangelMadzz
No. It will not resemble the RX 580, the Xbox One X resembles that particular GPU from a performance/architectural perspective.
I am talking about chip positioning, the RX 580 was a mid-range GPU, same as the Playstation 5's GPU due to size, TDP and costs of the parts themselves.
@shikamaru317 AMD hasn't released big Navi this year. nVidia hasn't released Ampere.
When they launch the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X late this year, those particular GPU's will have dropped down a notch in the performance hierarchy relative to PC GPU's.
The GPU's should sit around the same level as the PS4 relative to the PC when that happens.
We still have 6+ months for new high-end GPU's to release that will put PC GPU's a notch higher than they are currently.
People seem to forget that Navi released a year ago... And Turing released in 2018... We are overdue for high-end PC GPU's, the PC doesn't sit still and wait for consoles to release remember.
As for the Playstation 4... While the Playstation 4's GPU was roughly on par with a Radeon 7850... We already had the Radeon R9 290X release before the Playstation 4 released, which put the PC an entire GPU generation ahead.
Price is also not a correct thing to focus on... It is common knowledge that over the past several years the average selling price has risen...
Radeon 7970 released at $500 USD, that was a high-end GPU... Vega 7 crept the price up to $700 USD and Big Navi is likely to be even higher than that as Little Navi is $550 USD.
It's product positioning that is the important facet.
