Fable Legends, the newest entry in Microsoft and Lionhead’s long running fantasy franchise, may not seem like much of a looker (although it does have a rather striking artstyle), but it has some pretty impressive technology powering it under the scenes, it seems. Speaking to Bidness Etc, Lionhead’s Stuart Whyte recently confirmed that Fable Legends uses some fairly impressive, high level technology.

The developer claims that DX12 has helped the Xbox One to have better graphical and computing capabilities, without actually updating the hardware. “Fable Legends is using a number of features on Xbox One,” said Whyte, “including asynchronous compute and efficient multi-threaded rendering.” This has enabled the developer to “push the visual bar higher than would otherwise be possible.”

Of course, this kind of thing sounds like it is par for the course for Microsoft’s newest API- DirectX 12 is, by all accounts, a wondrous IP that can extract far more performance from hardware than was possible earlier. It is good to see that it will have some definite yields and benefits, even on the Xbox One.

Fable Legends will launch some time this year on the Xbox One and PC. The game will be having a closed beta in the coming months first.