With Microsoft announcing the Xbox One Scorpio at this year’s E3 there has been a lot of speculation and excitement about the capabilities of the new hardware. There are a wide range of opinions from game developers about the Scorpio and today the technical wizards from Digital Foundry published an interview with Mike Rayner, Technical Director for The Coalition.
In the interview, Rayner shared his thoughts on the new hardware stating that they are ready to fully leverage the power of the Scorpio due to their scaleable engine. “For Gears development, we are in a really good position to leverage Project Scorpio to its fullest while continuing a no-compromise approach for all platforms we currently ship the game on,” he said. “We have invested in scalable features in our engine to support a broad range of GPUs and performance profiles for PC and Console. We have authored our content at 4K, which allows us to show higher resolutions with increased source content detail on the highest end GPUs.”
“As a developer I find it very attractive having a universal platform to target and optimise our game across multiple Windows Devices: Xbox One, Xbox One S, Project Scorpio, and Windows 10. With the universal platform, we can do this in a manner that allows everyone to play together over Xbox Live without compromising our ability to push each device to its full potential while leaving none of our fans behind, no matter what device they play on.”
Given that Gears of War 4 launches a full year before the Scorpio, it will be interesting to see whether the game gets an update next year. Gears of War 4 already runs at 1080p and 30fps (single player) on the Xbox One so perhaps The Coalition can get it to run at 4K/30fps or at 1080p/60fps with enhanced visual effects on the new console.