Some info on how developing for the XSX is, what compromises needed to be made for the 120FPS, etc.
No loading times confirmed, too!
More here: https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/06/10/inside-xbox-series-x-optimized-dirt-5/
Q: "What excites you most about developing and bringing Dirt 5 to life on next-generation hardware?"
A: Xbox Series X has a whole host of exciting new features, so it's hard to choose from them all!
Dirt 5 is a beautiful, fast, action-packed amplified off-road racing game and so being able to play it with options for 120fps on Xbox Series X is incredible.
But Dirt 5 is also a very social experience. I can't wait to see the beautiful screenshots users are going to post on Xbox and social media, using the new share button on the Series X controller, captured using our fantastic Photo Mode – I'm really looking forward to all the pictures people will take of lightning! These shots are going to look incredible on Series X, its RDNA 2 GPU is going to enable us to turn all the features up to 11 – and there are some extremely talented game photographers out there, I'll be keeping an eye out!
Q: In addition to benefiting from the power and performance of Xbox Series X for quicker load times etc. what Xbox Series X features were you most excited to explore leveraging in the development of Dirt 5?
A: I love that features like the fast SSD and the ray-tracing capabilities of the GPU are some of the more talked about but I am very impressed with the power of the new Zen 2 based processor.
The CPU is very powerful – and its simultaneous multi-threading is very impressive! We're used to dealing with the concept of running multiple threads on PC CPU cores and sharing the resources of that processor across multiple threads but actually, the SMT in the Series X processor is far more capable than usual CPUs. We found that the Dirt 5 engine was able to easily make great use of this and sprang to life across the 16 hardware threads available to us on Series X.
Q: What is it like developing on Xbox Series X?
A: Transitioning development to a new console platform, like Xbox Series X, is usually very painful. You have to deal with new tools, new workflows, new ways of thinking.
This time around the team at Xbox brought me a new toolset called the Game Development Kit, which they already had up and running on Xbox One.
This meant that we could make the transition much earlier. In fact, we started doing the groundwork for Xbox Series X development long before we even received the hardware. This kind of thinking from Xbox allowed us to get a real head-start on next-gen development, so after receiving our early Xbox Series X hardware, we were up and running really quickly.
No loading times confirmed, too!
Q: Which enhancement were you most excited about to explore leveraging for Dirt 5 on Xbox Series X?
A: Obviously, that SSD drive is incredible. It's not like a PC SSD, it's more than that. Being able to load data so ridiculously fast is not only really impressive but as a developer, it's very interesting.
For Dirt 5, we're going to be able to get into races super fast. It means no loading screens getting in the way, no dawdling, no looking at my phone, it means that the action will be non-stop.
In the future, I'm really excited to see how this technology is going to change the face of videogames because I really believe it will.
More here: https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/06/10/inside-xbox-series-x-optimized-dirt-5/
