The Xbox Scarlett is looking like an impressive piece of hardware, based o what we’ve heard about it so far. Things such as its SSD and its GDDR6 memory have drawn a lot of praise from developers hoping to work on it already, but beyond that, there’s still plenty in the console that already sounds promising. For instance, the console’s native support for accelerated ray tracing, that promises next gen games that will look better than ever.
One developer in particular who’s excited about that is The Coalition, makes of Gears 5 – one of the best looking games of the year. Speaking in an interview with Digital Foundry, The Coalition’s technical art director Colin Penty said that he was looking forward to seeing what the Xbox Scarlett’s ray tracing support would enable in terms of visuals for next gen titles.
“On Gears 5 we are using GPU compute-based ray traced distance field shadows which works across all platforms and does not depend on DXR or dedicated ray tracing hardware,” said Penty. “We are excited with the possibilities of DXR and Project Scarlett’s native hardware support for accelerated ray tracing. At this point, we are not ready to talk about our future plans, however we are following closely the emerging techniques and innovations in this exciting space.”
Gears 5 is out now on Xbox One and PC, and seems to be doing pretty well on all fronts since launch. Make sure to check out our review through here.