Plenty of developers have spoken about the more powerful hardware that the PS5 and Xbox Series X boast of, and what this hardware is going to enable them to do with games going forward. Where the Xbox Series X is concerned, parts of its architecture, such as the SSD and the impressive GPU, have impressed many in the industry, and another developer who’s similarly impressed is Fatshark, who are working on the upcoming first person action title Warhammer 40,000: Darktide.
We recently had the chance to shoot a bunch of questions at Fatshark, and got responses from CEO Martin Wahlund, technical producer Mikael Hansson, and Darktide’s game director Anders De Geer. When asked about the Xbox Series X’s SSD and GPU, they said that they should help with more efficient streaming of content and creating more immersive experiences.
“The faster SSD will have the most significant impact on the way we build games,” the developer said. “It will allow game developers to more efficiently stream content directly from disk to more efficiently use our available runtime memory. The fact that we can guarantee that all players will have a fast SSD in their systems will also allow us to slim down our content packages significantly. By not requiring us to optimize our packages for faster loading times by duplicating content we will be able to deliver more content to players in a smaller footprint. As for the GPU horsepower, short term it will of course allow us to render the Warhammer 40K world in more vivid detail and at a faster frame rate than ever before to deliver more immersive experiences to our players.”
They went on to say, however, that specifically where their games are concerned, they are far more excited about increased CPU performance in the new consoles, which brings the hardware much closer to PC hardware.
“As mentioned before, with the current performance profile of our games we are in fact much more excited about the increase in CPU performance for this generation that sits much closer to the current PC counterparts than the increase in GPU performance which we will easily consume by just turning up the quality settings nobs, resolution and framerate targets.”
In the same interview, the Darktide developers also spoke to us about the less powerful Xbox Series S, saying that the system won’t “significantly limit the game development progress as a whole in any way”. Read more on that through here.
Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is due out for the Xbox Series X/S and PC some time in 2021. Our full interview with the developers will be live soon, so stay tuned for that.