Xbox Boss Wants to Focus More on Frame Rate Over Higher Resolutions

Microsoft has been pushing the Xbox One X and, in more recent times, the Xbox Series X fairly hard. While the former was established as a console capable of 4K resolution gaming, the latter is touted as the most powerful console ever made. But despite all the emphasis on power and the resulting graphical fidelity, Xbox head Phil Spencer wants more focus on the “feel of the games”.

While speaking to Stevivor, it was noted that the Xbox Series X could offer 8K resolution gaming. However, Spencer said that playing games in 4K resolution with a higher frame rate is preferable. “We’ve never really tried to limit what developers are trying to do on our platform, whether it’s 60 frames per second on Xbox 360 or people doing 4K, 60 [frames-per-second] now on Xbox One X. We want to give developers the tools to go try things that they want to go try on any of the hardware platforms and capability can be there for them to go try things.

“I think we’ve reached a point with Xbox One X in this generation where games look amazing, and there’s always work we can do to look more amazing. But I want games to feel as amazing as they look. We don’t have that in today’s generation, mainly because the CPU is under-powered relative to the GPU that’s in the box in order to reach a feel and frame rate and kind of consistency or variable refresh rate and other things that we want.

“As we were looking at the future, the feel of the games was definitely something that we wanted to have more focus on, not just throwing more pixels up on the screen.”

In terms of games, Halo Infinite will be available for the Xbox Series X at launch while titles like Senua’s Sacrifice: Hellblade 2 have been touted as exclusive to the platform. While nailing game feel in the future is an admirable goal, one has to wonder how Microsoft’s game lineup will shake out. After all, it will be one to two years before the console will see exclusives.

The Xbox Series X is due to release this year during the holiday season. While detailed specifications have to be revealed, Spencer did reveal several months ago that the GPU was capable of hitting about 12 Teraflops, making it twice as powerful as the Xbox One X. The console will also feature an NVMe solid state drive, GDD6 RAM and a CPU that’s four times more powerful than the Xbox One.