We took some comments from the team at Snowed in Studios, a team made up of industry veterans contributing to several projects such as Dead by Daylight and We Happy Few more recently, while leading many of the huge improvements we saw in Deus Ex Human Revolution Director's Cut in years past. Alexandre Sabourin is Team Lead over at the studio and offered some insights into how hardware-accelerated ray-tracing, improved processing power, and SSD boosts will help the Xbox Series X.

Ray-tracing will allow for more realistic and flexible art direction. There's a lot of research around raytracing that can be leveraged here that could lead to some very interesting concepts. Reflections, soft shadows, refraction, transparency. But all these operations have a cost. Raytracing hardware allows us to do some interesting things, but usually, production raytracers can take quite some time to converge to a reasonable image. The limit on samples per pixel means that there has been an interesting race to determine who can write an efficient denoiser. I'm interested to see what this new tech will lead to in terms of new research being done. Denoiser's are one interesting avenue, but maybe it will allow developers to write their own light mappers, or pre-render cinematics more effectively.

What does it mean for game graphics? It means that developers are creating new ideas on how to use this tech, pushing the boundaries in a different direction than it's been pushed before.

Processing power is always useful to allow developers to create more expansive worlds, more complex interactions, and to improve our ability to include more content into our games. It can also enable developers to spend less time optimizing and spend more time creating. Chip efficiency is also a big deal when it comes to the power wall. There comes a limit to how fast you can clock a CPU and how small you can make your transistors if operations require a lot of energy, then your chip needs more cooling to mitigate the damage. As a result, if you can reduce power consumption, you can increase the number of transistors you can fit on a chip. If you can reduce the cost of executing instructions, then you can increase your overall clock rate while maintaining your heat output. More instructions equal more "good."

Hard drives have always been a hard constraint that developers have to deal with. SSDs provide some interesting benefits such as removing the necessity for seek times, which might provide flexibility in how you would pack data on disk. Of course, read times are also improved. SSDs can provide data significantly faster than HDDs can. This will help mitigate loading screens and improving our ability to stream large worlds more efficiently.