With E3 2017 now behind us and Microsoft’s upgraded console, Xbox One X (formerly Scorpio), out in the wild, attention is now firmly on the games coming to the platform to justify its $499 ($649 AUD) price tag. One such game will be Forza Motorsport 7, and Microsoft insists it’s a game that will make the console worth the expensive entry point.
Forza 7 will be among the first games to run at native 4K. Chris Tector, a software architect for the game’s engine, recently spoke with Eurogamer about the title and its performance on Xbox One. The terminology is a bit wordy, and it seems to carry on from Microsoft’s obsession with “teraflops”, but it gives us an insight into just what the console is capable of achieving.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dokpy_KIuyA&list=PL0il2l-B_Wwa6GfRKWiQ_ARje9-QwB7Qc&index=4
Tector explained that the team has always tried to hit native resolution, as they want to have surface variations happening per pixel, “because we have these hard, clean edges”.
“Even at 4K we still have a little bit of aliasing, but that’s the type of stuff that we get to work on heading into the future,” he said. “I know there’s other techniques and other people will want to use them for their quality decisions but for us, being able to get those little streaks of specular you’ll get off the track.”
He explained that these were “like pixel level things or sub-pixel levels” that you miss out on when things aren’t running at native resolutions.
“Even when you go to a movie at the theatre and it’s projected at 4K, it’s compressed and it’s running at 24 frames a second,” he said.
As for games, he said natively rendered at 4K means they’re the “cleanest, uncompressed pixels” possible, rendering at 60 frames a second.
“The really cool part is that we’re doing this for console gamers now,” he said. “So rather than hoping you can afford a multi-thousand dollar PC that can achieve it, we’re going to have people playing at console, native 4K, 60 frames a second. It’s going to be awesome.”
Forza 7 will be roughly 100GB in size when it launches on Xbox One X on October 3.
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