We are now in the beginnings of a new generation of consoles and, of course, that opens up a lot of possibilities for new technologies. Both Sony and Microsoft are looking to up their game, while their many tech partners, especially AMD who worked closely with both companies. Now AMD and Xbox have some new things for those who develop on Xbox.
As announced at the Game Stack Live event, and detailed by the good folks at Wccftech, it was confirmed that AMD FidelityFX was now available for developers on both next generation Xbox boxes. AMD FidelityFX is a toolkit for image-quality that allows easier implementation of various things such as ambient occlusion, variable shading, and AMD’s custom sharpening techniques. It is somewhat comparable to Nividia’s DLSS tech.
“Today, we are very happy to announce that AMD FidelityFX is now available for Xbox! This news makes it even easier than before to write cross-platform games, with developers able to access select AMD FidelityFX effects with specific optimizations for Windows and Xbox. Game developers can now utilize further platform-specific optimizations with AMD FidelityFX, straight from the Xbox Series X/S Game Development Kit.
“This development is very exciting to all at AMD who have worked to deliver these effects into the hands of even more developers – and we will continue to strive for our highly optimized effects to be at the forefront of cross-platform game development. Xbox Game Developers interested in getting started with AMD FidelityFX can do so with the latest Game Development Kit (GDK), where samples for Contrast Adaptive Sharpening, Variable Shading, and Raytraced Shadow Denoiser technologies are available.”
For now, the support for the toolkit is only available for the Xbox Series X/S on the console space, but Sony’s PS5 also has AMD chips, so it’s possible it could come there at a later date. Either way, it’s more tools for developers to wow us in the new generation.
