Microsoft has unleashed tons of new details about the Xbox Series X, from a breakdown of its full specifications to videos comparing loading time with the Xbox One X. However, in a full hands-on feature with Eurogamer and Digital Foundry, we’ve learned more about current Xbox One titles being ported over to the Xbox Series X. The Coalition’s Gears 5 is one, making use of Microsoft DirectX Ray-tracing.
The Coalition technical director Mike Raynor, who also worked on Gears 5, said the team was “super excited for DXR and the hardware ray tracing support. We have some compute-based ray tracing in Gears 5, we have ray traced shadows and the [new] screen-space global illumination is a form of ray traced screen-based GI and so, we’re interested in how the ray tracing hardware can be used to take techniques like this and then move them out to utilising the DXR cores”
Even more impressive is how the Xbox Series X conversion for Gears 5 only took two weeks. With some help from Epic Games, the team had Unreal Engine 4 working on the console, increased all graphical qualities to the PC equivalent of Ultra, used the engine’s new ray-traced screen-space global illumination and brought in contact shadows. All of this and the port still managed to run at a rock solid 60 frames per second. The publication noted that benchmark results on this port, described as “unoptimized”, offered performance that was “very, very similar” to that of Nvidia RTX 2080.
Raynor also confirmed that Gears 5 would support Smart Delivery so Xbox One players who already own the title will get a free Xbox Series X version at launch. “I think relative to where we’re at and just looking at our experience with the hardware with this particular game, I think we’re really positive to kind of see how this thing is performing, especially knowing how much untapped performance is still there in the box based on the work we’ve done so far.”
Other titles currently confirmed to support Smart Delivery on Xbox Series X include CD Projekt RED’s Cyberpunk 2077. It wouldn’t be surprising for Microsoft to have much of its back-catalogue available for Xbox One players to easily transition over to the Series X. The console is currently slated to release in holiday 2020 – stay tuned for more details in the meantime.
