DigitalFoundry: Dirt 5 Next-Gen Interview: Xbox Series X|S

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Digital Foundry just shared this video about an Interview:

“Digital Foundry has been participating in our partner company’s prestige digital event - PAX x EGX. In this interview, Rich Leadbetter talks with Codemasters Technical Director for the Cheshire Studio, David Springate. Find out about the game, the opportunities for the next-gen consoles and learn more about how the game scales to Xbox Series S.”

Much talk about CPU capabilities for Xbox Series. Praise how easy it is to scale between Series X and Series S.

Don’t know why PS5 is actually in the title as most of the talk (90%+) is about Xbox and Playstation is only mentioned occasionally and as a by-product.

Video has my recommendation because you learn at least how this studios scale between all the hardware SKUs on the market.

Enjoy watching

Update: Video Summary:

Low latency input on Series X|S and consequences in game development

120FPS enablers: New CPU & GPU + clever engineering.

Hit over 100 FPS just by enabling SMT on the CPU, optimised from there. Easy to get running at over 100 FPS. Demonstrates the power of the new consoles, highlighted how powerful the Series X is when turning on SMT.

Asked whether it is “up to 120FPS” or “locked 120 FPS” - couldn’t fully answer, aiming for locked 120FPS, hitting that in some modes, currently 100-110 in career mode. Aiming for 120 across the entire title.

Series S: 60 fps minimum, the console is “a great piece of kit, it’s amazing”. 120 FPS mode also in the works.

Dirt 5 demo was running on Series S, Technical Director confirmed he captured the video himself, running on Series S.

Really easy to develop for Series S. Series S is Series X but targets 1440P instead. It has less RAM, but are you (us consumers) going to notice? Called out that we won’t notice 4K assets are missing on the 1440p version. Tuning means dialing back resolution and sometimes crowd numbers or intensity of weather effects, etc.

Talked about how their engine is configurable for the different strengths of each console, did call out that all the extra SKUs adds challenge for them in building a product that feels great across all.

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Thanks a lot for your thread @Colbert

Just watched the beginning, really interesting.

The XSS is really a tiny beast, a SX lite in fact.

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Some details

Code masters has designed the engine from the perspective of taking advantage of the hardware. They started with On Rush and it benefited them when they started making Dirt 5. They started with Xbox one’s 8 cores and when they switched to series X|S and enabled SMT - they started hitting over 100 fps right out of the gate.

He mentioned in detail that cpu0 is specifically used to schedule all the work of the other cpu cores. Which is built right into there engine.

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Hm but I thought it was very hard to develop for the Series S? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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So much concern over nothing by pseudo devs or some not working on dev kits.

I can understand if there are real concerns but we saw who were complaining and the context.

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Richard Leadbetter’s face when Codemasters keeps emphasizing how easy it is to develop for Series S

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Watched the entire interview and as I expected, as long as the development studios are doing what they should be doing, there shouldn’t be any issues. For Dirt 5, they have configurations for resolution and performance for each individual SKU. Game looks great and if it runs at 120FPS locked on Series X and Series S, well damn. Will be very impressed. The hardware is there for both Series X and Series S. It’s simply up to all the development studios worldwide to take advantage of it all to the best of their ability.

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Yeah I’m sure they had their motives so to speak… Whether that is fanboism, laziness, lack of skill, ignorance, attention seeking or a combination thereof is unknown.

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I noticed that too

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Good developers gonna develop and make their games run decently even on a potato, pseudo devs gonna complain on twat to please fanboys.

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I noticed that too but did not want it to write in the OP. The main points for me were that Codemaster studios tackle multiple SKUs with a good approach so they have a fitting performance profile for each device.

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Updated OP with a summary that I copied from another place.

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The thing I’ve seen on Twitter is that no name devs go hard against the Series S, while engineers/devs from DICE, Codemasters and other big studios are quite comfortable with it. With all due respect, I’ll trust what an engineer from DICE says about tech way more than what a 2 dev team making their first game say.

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I am glad the developer mentioned something I have been saying in that will the people who the Series S is aimed at care if 4K assets are not there for the games for Series S at 1440p. The answer is no due to the fact the person who the Series S is aimed at spent £250 for the console, price matters most for the person and as long as he or she can play the games at an acceptable standard is all that matters.

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Every time I see people mentioning things running on a potato, it makes me think of GLADOS. “Because I’m a potato” etc.

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The XSX is a beast. I love how non-anonymous devs are talking about the power of the X.

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Yep.

November cannot come soon enough.

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You are not wrong that dice is a very talented team, but that could be an issue if smaller teams had trouble with SS. They are the more likely ones to make bad performant games.

Thankfully, I don’t think we saw anyone with direct experience coding for it saying they had a hard time.

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A 1080p TV won’t be able to resolve those details anyhow. Even if the person cared about them so much as to go searching for them.

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No question about variable clock on PS5