The coronavirus pandemic has hit the video game industry hard. While it is true that all industries in general have ended up being affected, especially those that depend on raw materials, games received a huge blow to the head forcing delays and even cancellations of games.
A triple A development is much more expensive today than it used to be. And that tools like Unreal Engine or development kits for new consoles have become much more flexible.
At Xbox Game Studios, they’re still learning how to take advantage of the CPU
Matt Booty spoke at length on this topic, leaving us with some interesting headlines about how Xbox Game Studios is approaching the entire development process for its future games. Booty assures that some teams are still dragging issues derived from the pandemic.
In fact, he says that some next-gen features like ray tracing they are still being explored by Microsoft development teams.
The teams have really leaned in and found a lot of cool ways, and there’s actually been a lot of innovation on that as we’ve been working on COVID.
We are always at the forefront of a new generation of consoles. Teams are still discovering things like ray tracing.
However, it nuances and digs a little deeper when it comes to talking about the processor requirements that Xbox consoles currently have. The executive assures that they are still learning to work with them and benefit from them.
We’ve spent 5 or 10 years figuring out how to optimize things for GPUs, we want to move all the work to the graphics card and let the graphics card do all that work. Now, as games get heavier on things like simulation, and even some of the graphics workload, they’re actually more on the CPU side.
So now we have teams trying to kind of back up and figure out “What am I going to push to the CPU, how do I balance those two things?” We are still struggling with this.
It seems obvious that despite The Xbox Series is a very developer-friendly console; there are still things to learn to get good performance out of it. I imagine a lot of games have screwed it up by working on two versions (One and Series) and now is when we will see the full potential of the new machines since the One model is discontinued.
