One part of games that often gets only lip service paid to it, but is hugely important to immersion – especially as we transition to photorealism in our graphics – is skyboxes. How a video game sky looks can absolutely set the tone for the atmosphere of a game and its world (and indeed, wonderful sky boxes are the reason that games like Skyrim, The Witcher 3, Breath of the Wild, and Horizon: Zero Dawn have such great worlds- at least in part).
The leading provider of tech for skies and skyboxes to developers is Simul Software Engineers, whose trueSKY technology is the most advanced and reliable sky system available for other developers to use. trueSKY is cross platform, renderer agnostic, and also heavily dependent on the GPU.
So when GamingBolt had a chance to talk to Roderick Kennedy of Simul Software, we decided to ask him about how the differences between the PS4 Pro and the Xbox One X impacts the middleware- after all, the latter has a far more advanced GPU (the Xbox One X has 6TFLOPs and PS4 PRO has 4.2 TFLOPs of GPU). Does this mean that trueSKY would run better on the Xbox One X?
“Yes, it allows more work to be done in the same GPU time, so if a developer allocates 1.5ms for the sky, trueSKY can do (on Xbox One X) almost four times more work: rendering the clouds at double the resolution for example,” Kennedy said. “If you want to use the extra power to go from 30fps to 60, you can still do about twice as much per frame, so resolution could go up by about 30%.”
This is really impressive and we can’t wait to see what trueSKY can do on the Xbox One X in future games. Stay tuned to for our full interview with Roderick Kennedy in the coming days.