Phil Spencer has been chatting about some of his personal goals when it came to designing next gen hardware and leaving room for developers to expand, saying that higher frame rates feel a lot more essential than increasing resolution.
The Xbox boss was in conversation with Stevivor when he got candid about the benefits of setting a standard 4K resolution and reaching for a higher frame rate cap instead.
“We’ve never really tried to limit what developers are trying to do on our platform, whether it’s 60 frames per second on Xbox 360 or people doing 4K, 60 (frames-per-second) now on Xbox One X,” he explained. “We want to give developers the tools to go try things that they want to go try on any of the hardware platforms and capability can be there for them to go try things.
“I think we’ve reached a point with Xbox One X in the generation where games look amazing, and there’s always work we can do to look more amazing. But I want games to feel as amazing as they look. We don’t have that in today’s generation, mainly because the CPU is underpowered relative to the GPU that’s in the box in order to reach a feel and frame rate and kind of consistency or variable refresh rate and other things that we want.
“As we were looking at the future, the feel of the games was definitely something that we wanted to have more focus on, not just throwing more pixels up on the screen.”
Though the Xbox Series X and PS5 can both achieve 8K, it’s good to hear that Microsoft has a little 3D thinking at the top.
Wireframe #30 is out now
