A little over a year ago we told you about the progress made with the Variable update shading. This technology, which has been present in our Xbox Series X|S since the beginning, is used differently depending on the studio and the title. Like any novelty, it takes time for industry to master it. Because of this, Microsoft has updated its game stack overview for developers. With the lessons learned since the release of the consoles, they now have new use cases and best practices.
As done on gears 5 Where from ForzaHorizon 4more and more games are using second level technology. Specifically, for us gamers, this means more consistent framerate performance and improved visual quality. Because yes, and that’s not something we’re necessarily imagining, the VRS has a positive effect on the quality of the scenes. In fact, it was the developers themselves who reported this issue to Microsoft.
By allowing you to focus on what’s important to the display, bandwidth is freed for other tasks. This is all the more evident with certain titles such as e.g Halo infinity
You might be wondering if this Tier 2 is getting more adoption, is there still interest in the previous level? To put it simply, it must be said that not all tasks have the same needs. Using Tier 1 still makes sense for many applications: underwater objects, clouds/sky or particles are a few examples. This makes it possible not to allocate all resources to the same place and thus have more efficient processing. It’s great to see more and more teams adopting VRS and integrating it into their process.
Tech enthusiasts or developers in the audience can see everything in detail in the available video here.