Games should look better, on paper, on the XSX this Fall due to the raw power differential. Much like how games will load faster on the PS5, with zero optimizations needed, due to the raw speeds of the SSD.
But there are tech and effeciencies that can be leveraged to make these differences more pronounced. These are Direct X 12 Ultimate features that are meant to make the game more effecient with the hardware. I won’t get into them now, but when they say 2 to 3 to 5 times “multiplier”, they mean it.
The problem is that there’s no game that I know of that supports it (there might be, I just don’t know of it). I don’t know if this is common knowledge but not many games support Direct X 12, even. Many big games, including Flight Sim, use DX11.
Many game engines from 3rd party developers didn’t make the jump to 12, and I’m sure they will now to 12 Ultimate to support things like RT on new PC hardware. The question is how soon?
Once massive middleware engines like Unity and Unreal Engine support DX12U, that opens up a lot of games, but many developers use their own engines.
A DX12U showcase title at launch would have been nice, but until then maybe it’ll take an upgraded Forza Horizon 4 and Gears 5 to show off its potential.
These effeciencies do involve a bit of work and a different way of looking at how game engines work. It also involves some decision making at the onset of creating your game engine. Mesh shaders are versatile and allow me to do things like reduce the size of meshes in memory. Or I could use them for advanced geometry culling to ensure high framerates. There is a slight cost to using it but the benefit to saving memory is massive. Also, you need to optimize how you use it (ie. Using texture arrays instead of doing this separately for a diffuse texture, normal map, etc) to optimize this feature.
So there’s work to be done to take advantage of some of the features and it’s a new way of looking at making your engine. Much like how devs had to go from a world of polygons and textures to using shaders, materials, and so on. And I didn’t even get into RT.
Halo Infinite was previously set to launch in 2 months without RT support, only to have it patched in later. That alone tells us that there’s some work involved, some complexities and some learning in order to get the new features implemented and optimized.
Making great looking games that use the latest tech is hard. It’s more work. 16GB of RAM for these new machines is less than ideal but that’s where the cost of RAM puts us. So you need do be effecient and whether you’re using the SSD or sampler feedback to address it, it involves work.