Graphical Boost Coming for Xbox Series X/S

When the Xbox Series X/S consoles were released last November much was made of their next-generation graphics prowess. The extra power of these new consoles gave them a considerable advantage over their forebearers when it came to displaying beautiful games at high framerates.

What would you say if I told you these already superb graphics are set to get even better, and at no extra cost to the user? Hard as it may be to believe, this is exactly what seems to be happening to our new Xbox consoles!

AMD’s Announcement

During the Microsoft Game Stack Live 2021 event in April, AMD announced it had made available a selection of its FidelityFX feature-set to Xbox Series X/S games developers. This has been made possible due to Microsoft consoles’ use of AMD’s CPU (Central Processing Unit) and GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) hardware.

The Xbox Series X/S contains an 8-core AMD Zen 2 CPU with RDNA 2 GPU. For most people this technical jargon means nothing. The only thing that matters is this is the hardware which does most of the heavy lifting to give us great next-gen graphics capabilities. What was hitherto unknown to most gamers is that this AMD hardware also contains what’s known as FidelityFX.

At the Game Stack event, AMD announced FidelityFX would bring:

“Great Looking Games for Gamers, Low Development Costs for Developers”.

FidelityFX technology has been used on PC games for over a year and has been unleashed in over eighty titles. It is made up of eight graphics boosting features, three of which have now been made available to Xbox games developers. It is great news that even a selection of this incredibly powerful feature-set will be coming to Xbox.

New Features

FidelityFX will bring new visual effects such as Ray Tracing Deioniser which takes the fuzzing or graininess out of ray-traced shadow scenes. Contrast Adaptive Sharpening, which helps to sharpen an image especially when the game is being upscaled to higher resolutions. Variable Shading is used to vary the amount of colour shading on images displayed on screen to improve the image’s quality without unduly stressing the hardware. This means the new visual effects won’t affect the game’s framerate, which speaks to its fluidity and smoothness in play.

The technobabble aside, this just adds tools to the game developer’s toolkit to make our games more next-gen than they already are, making possible more sumptuous graphics without hurting the smoothness of gameplay.

These improvements then will be made available to both Xbox Series X and Series S machines equally. Although the games look great now, when game developers fully get a grasp on the new opportunities and code accordingly, the new games coming down the line are set to look epic.

Implementation Timescale

Now, there is one word of caution to temper the joy. Although the graphics boost will be made available, it is up to the game developers to code their games to fully take advantage of it. Few games scheduled to come out in the short term may be ready for this and so we may not see the benefits of this technology immediately.

Final Thoughts

This announcement is excellent news for the gaming community with the next wave of Series X/S game titles promising to have even better visuals and higher framerates than those of the existing “Optimised for Series X/S” titles. Games developers have already received development kits including the new FidelityFX features and so should be incorporating these capabilities into their new games shortly.

Microsoft may not get it all its own way though. Sony’s PS5 graphics hardware is also provided by AMD. Although nothing has been announced yet as to FidelityFX usage on PS5 games, it is at least a possibility.

In the meantime, Xbox fans can rejoice in the knowledge that the already great graphics quality of the new console games, should be getting even better in the near future.

I originally published this article in Medium in 2021

https://superjumpmagazine.com/graphical-boost-coming-for-xbox-series-x-s-d8785d1fd512