Developers: What Xbox Series X’s Massive Power Means for Graphics, Gameplay by Bo Moore

Developers: What Xbox Series X’s Massive Power Means for Graphics, Gameplay –

After the Xbox Series X was announced, one of the first things Microsoft bragged about was the console’s 12 teraflops of GPU power. That’s not a precise benchmark, but it’s a big, impressive number – double that of the Xbox One X, the current most powerful console, and outpacing all but the highest of high-end PC graphics cards. And while we don’t know the PlayStation 5’s specs yet, we can expect it to at least approach the same neighborhood. In simple terms, that level of power means that 4K resolution at 60 frames per second – and 1080p at 120 fps – will likely become the expected level of performance for games going forward. But beyond higher resolutions and better frame rates, what does more horsepower actually mean for next-gen games? I interviewed several people in the industry to get a sense of how that power level might actually impact the games we’ll be playing in the next generation.

Not Just Better Graphics – Better Simulations

As hardware gets more powerful, it mainly enables two things: better graphics and better performance. The performance side is easy to understand – games will load faster, have higher frame rates, and slow down less during demanding spurts of gameplay. “Better graphics,” though, is sometimes a bit harder to grok. Sure, you can just say things will “look better,” but there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes than just rendering a more photorealistic image.

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A critical part of making games more realistic is better and more powerful simulations. Common real-world things like water, cloth, and hair are notoriously difficult to realistically simulate, but a more powerful GPU means more capability to render those systems without bogging things down.

“Smoke, water, wind – things like that are great for GPU processing,” says Bruce Straley, former creative director at Naughty Dog. A great example of this is hair and fur; even as character faces have become more and more photorealistic in recent years, hair often still looks like clumped, plasticky strings. “It’s always been really difficult to make really good hair. And then hair responding to different environments – hair and water, hair and wind, hair and hair gel, are all reactions that can be processed,” Straley says.

Older hardware is certainly capable of rendering these systems we’re talking about, but if they were too complex – or you had too many of them running in parallel, such as strands of hair blowing in the wind or responding to getting wet – then your framerate would chug down to unplayable levels. Having more teraflops (which is short for trillions of floating point operations per second) means more capability to perform the operations needed to smoothly render these systems in real time.

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“Essentially, more teraflops means more GPU to put to work across the game,” says Elijah Freeman, VP of games at Virtuos, a studio that specializes in porting and remastering games for new systems. “This means a game can do more impressive things at the same time, with fewer compromises. You’ll see much higher framerates, for example. While the current generation of consoles offers you 30 or 60 fps, the next generation will be offering you 4K visuals at 60 fps combined with 1080p at 120 fps. Games are going to look slick and buttery smooth at high resolutions.”

Wider Accessibility To Powerful Tools Means More Great-Looking Games

Power levels like the Series X’s 12 teraflops enable graphical techniques beyond just trying to achieve photorealism that escapes the uncanny valley. Several developers I spoke to pointed to the kind of stylized rendering that Pixar does as being more possible thanks to the hardware-accelerated ray tracing on the Series X.

“Ray tracing is probably the biggest gap between what game graphics can do and what high-end VFX and Pixar and movie graphics can do,” says Bryant Cannon, lead developer at Night School Studio, the developer of Oxenfree and Afterparty. “[With ray tracing], they’re actually stimulating the lights bouncing from light to different surfaces.”

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Ray tracing is used to accurately simulate light, reflections, and shadows, among other things – not just approximate or ‘fake’ them as most games currently do. This technology has been possible in PC games since late 2018, when Nvidia launched its RTX series of graphics cards, but is incredibly demanding on graphics hardware and has yet to be adopted by the gaming industry at large. The Xbox Series X (and potentially the PlayStation 5, which has not yet had all its features announced) will be the first time the technology is available to console developers and players.

“Something like a Pixar rendering system will rely heavily on subsurface scattering for flesh tones and skin,” Straley says. “If you wanted to make something rendered like The Incredibles, where you have light coming through the earlobes of your character – we faked it at Naughty Dog. We had all sorts of ways to simulate it, but it wasn’t real. If now I can write a shader that has subsurface scattering on it and hook into the ray tracing system, then more people are going to be able to do that.”

And that’s what’s really important: while the best developers in the business have always been able to make games look great, these graphical advancements mean you don’t have to be a wizard to pull off those illusions anymore. Small developer teams who currently have to prioritize processing resources for the rendering and simulation systems that are necessary for their game to work now have more resources to spend.

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“All these things are going to be more accessible to smaller teams,” says a veteran developer with both a technical and creative background (who asked to remain anonymous). “Basically because the machine’s handling so much of the workload. A lot of the stuff that we have to do on our side, for similar effect, is now just given to us.”

That includes things like collisions – on the scale of millions of collisions per frame – or voxel-based systems like Minecraft, but at a significantly higher resolution, that simply wouldn’t have been possible on older hardware. “So you can have vessels that are made out of voxels that have liquid voxels within,” the developer says, “and when exposed to air when they’re busted open, can turn into fire voxels – all these sorts of things that we couldn’t even dream of before.”

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“The reality is we never could get to the point where we could actually do that, and see what that really looks like,” the developer says, “and the results are pretty stunning. So I think what’s going to be easier, for smaller teams in particular, is to experiment with things that we never thought we could experiment with because we just didn’t have an engine for it. We didn’t have the ability to do it. And now just the brute force of this hardware is going to give us that.”

With more power available, developers – especially those on small teams with limited resources – will be able to spend less time optimizing and more time creating content and systems or fixing bugs. “Optimization takes a lot more effort than a lot of people realize,” Cannon says. “The important thing for us is that we get performance by default and we don’t need to spend a lot of time on making sure our game runs as fast as possible.”

The evolutionary nature of the transition between the current and next generation benefits developers too, because the skills they’ve learned and tools they’re used to working with carry over to the new consoles. Essentially, the new consoles are an upgrade rather than a reboot.

“[Through previous generation leaps], I had to relearn a whole new system. You had to learn how the [new] architecture worked,” the anonymous developer says. “Right now everything is kind of an evolution. So things that you know how to do now apply to the next generation, and they compartmentalize the things you’re going to have to learn. Things like ray tracing is something you’re going to have to learn, but it’s not throwing the baby out with the bath water to do it. So it’s really an interesting time because this is the first time that I feel we’re getting that retention or muscle memory that we get to keep going into the next generation with the amount of fire power these systems can give you.”

It’s Not Just About Looks – Gameplay Benefits, Too

We take for granted that many great games were only possible due to advancements in hardware power. Without 3D acceleration, there would be no Quake. Battle royale games like Fortnite and Apex Legends only exist because processors can handle dozens and dozens of players in a game at once.

“The availability of these tools, and this power, means there’s more opportunities for people to play with styles and concepts and ideas,” Straley says. “And hopefully there’s more interesting or wacky ideas that become realized, because I was never able to play with ray tracing or some kind of dynamic global illumination…that now opens up a new opportunity to think about game design differently, or an experience differently.”

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Straley compares the new access to ray tracing to how the Havok physics engine, which is software that could be licensed and integrated into a project that allowed more developers to implement physics in their games when they otherwise would have had to dedicate significant resources to coding a physics system in-house.

“One key area that will almost certainly see improvement is volumetric effects such as smoke, fog, and clouds,” says Freeman. “These are effects that scatter light and have previously been presented in games with mixed results. What makes this all interesting is the effect this might also have on gameplay. Yes, improved smoke effects will be great to look at, but the ability to just barely glimpse an enemy if the light catches them right after you’ve thrown a smoke grenade adds a new level of nuance to playstyles.”

Straley agrees, mentioning that previous and current-generation hardware hasn’t always been able to keep up with the design decisions he and his team wanted to make. “In The Last Of Us, we had an ambient shadow system which we had to downrez significantly, and it sure would be great if we could do that at a higher resolution and get more fidelity in it,” he says. “Something like this makes that more possible.”

Our anonymous developer points to liquid and fire simulations – and the ability to design gameplay systems around those elemental interactions – as something that would be more possible on next-gen hardware.

“For instance, when you can burn water to create gas and see all those effects happening super fast on screen in high resolution – and trying to figure out ways to apply some kind of unique gameplay to that,” the developer says. “Or ways where we can cast light of varying colors, and combine colors of light to open a door, or cast your shadow with other combinations of light to open something or activate something.”

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Better and more realistic water simulation was a common topic with the developers I spoke to. “That’s something that’s really hard to do in real time unless it’s extremely simplified,” Cannon says. “Back when I was at Disney, we were working on a game called Where’s My Water? that had a 2D water simulation, and that was pretty much as far as we can get right now. But if we have a full fluid simulation that can be part of the gameplay somehow, I think that’d be really interesting.”

Straley echoes that point too. “What I’m doing with the water still becomes a design decision,” he says. “Am I using the water as a mechanic in a puzzle game, or an obstacle in a platforming game? Versus ‘wow that water looks really good.’ It always comes down to design decisions. We have all of this power, but the choices are what we do with it, and how do we make games more compelling and the experiences richer, and not necessarily more realism.”

Bigger, More Vibrant and Lived-In Worlds

For bigger teams who can spend time optimizing, we’ll likely see some even more impressive environments in games.

“The increased power and speed of consoles like the Xbox Series X will mean worlds many times bigger than we’ve seen before, and with more stuff in them too,” Virtuos’s Freeman says. “You’ll also be able to move around them much quicker, whether that’s driving in a high-speed sports car or flying around on a dragon, perhaps with no loading screens at all.”

That last point will be thanks to the next-gen consoles’ SSDs, which have significantly faster data transfer rates than the spinning-disc hard drives found in the current generation. That mostly just means faster saving and loading times, but it can have an effect on gameplay too.

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“Having an SSD, the actual gameplay implication that I think of first is world streaming,” Cannon says. “That’s something that’s really hard to do seamlessly, especially with a studio of our size, and having a solid state drive where we can be pretty sure that the level is going to load in seconds, we can have a streaming world that doesn’t really impact our performance too much and it doesn’t have too many design problems when it comes to hiding the loading from the player.”

Beyond being bigger and loading faster with reduced pop-in, game worlds will also have the capacity to feel more vibrant and alive than ever before, because better simulations will play into how those worlds are populated too.

“There is always more we can do with simulation that we couldn’t do before,” Cannon says. “For example, wanting to make a game with a really big crowd, and every person in the crowd is rendered at a very high resolution. That’s maybe something that couldn’t be done gameplay-wise that we can do now.”

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In Night School’s underworld bar-hopping game Afterparty, every character in each scene has an AI that has them walking around, doing various actions, and getting drunk. Cannon says that the original plan was for all those bar-dwelling demons to have their own individual simulated level of drunkenness, with their animations changing based on how drunk they are.

“We realized that a) it wasn’t that important to the gameplay to have everything simulated like that. And b) it was having a pretty big effect on our performance, and the frame rate was suffering because of it. So we decided to scale that down,” he says. “But if we were to make this game on the Xbox Series X or the PS5, then maybe we would’ve been able to have all of that simulation playing out [without sacrificing performance]. Even though it didn’t have a big effect on the gameplay – it was more of an aesthetic thing – it would have made the bar feel even more alive and dynamic.”

Realism Isn’t Everything

It’s important to remember that while the Xbox Series X promises an impressive level of performance, it will take a while for developers to make use of all of that power. On top of that, Microsoft’s plan for every first-party Xbox game to be playable on the original Xbox One – at least for the first year or two into the new generation – means developers will still need to make games that are capable of running on that older hardware with the graphics settings turned down. So gameplay that depends on complex simulations might not be in the cards right away.

“It’s going to take some time before any studio – especially small studios – is comfortable releasing their games on only new hardware,” Cannon says. That’s due in part to the fact that there won’t be nearly as many next-generation consoles out there as there are older ones for several years at least, which means fewer people would be able to buy and play a next-gen-only game.

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Whether it’s higher resolutions, photorealistic graphics, stylized lighting, or massive, dynamic worlds, it’s clear that next-generation hardware will enable games to be more realistic than ever before. Of course, realism isn’t everything. It’s about how developers can put that power to use to enable their creativity in different ways.

“I don’t necessarily need more realism,” Straley says. “I don’t want a realistic plumber. I don’t want Ron Jeremy in a plumber’s outfit trying to make a jump. But I want Mario, and I want him to jump how the designers have decided to make him jump.” Fortunately, realism isn’t the only leveled up feature developers can offer with the power of next-gen.

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Bo Moore is IGN’s Executive Editor of Tech. Follow him on Twitter @usebomswisely where he frequently tweets about his cats.

This story was originally featured at https://www.ign.com/articles/what-xbox-series-xs-12-teraflops-actually-means-for-graphics-gameplay