Learn about ‘the soul’ of the next Xbox
Remember back in March when Sony had Mark Cerny give a pre-recorded presentation on all the deep-dive technical capabilities of the PlayStation 5? It was extremely beneficial and useful and enlightening — just not for the vast majority of the people who were watching. It was mostly lost on the video game-playing layman, as their only takeaway was “Okay, I guess this thing will be powerful as heck.”
Microsoft has now done the same for the Xbox Series X but in text format. In a new post on Xbox Wire, Microsoft explains the Xbox Velocity Architecture. This is, broadly, about optimizing performance and speed through new rendering techniques. It’s very much a “sum is greater than the parts” kind of thing, as the four components — custom NVME SSD, hardware accelerated decompression, DirectStorage API, and Sampler Feedback Streaming — combine to enable Xbox Series X to achieve something that Microsoft says is “beyond the raw specifications of the hardware itself.”
Accompanying the Xbox Wire post is the sizzle reel trailer that’s embedded above. Here are all the very dense bullet points laid over the very flashy video:
- Custom NVME SSD — Storage throughput 40x faster than Xbox One
- Next-gen DirectStorage API — Prioritizes game data for ultra-low latency
- Dedicated hardware-accelerated decompression — Maximizes throughput and CPU performance
- New Sampler Feedback Streaming — On-demand texture detail eliminates wasted loading
- Delivers a 2.5x multiplier of SSD performance and memory on average
- Engineered to deliver the ultimate next-gen gaming experience
If you know a thing or two about I/O throughput, memory usage, and hardware-accelerated decompression, go give the Xbox Wire post a read. If not, you’re probably fine with the exact same takeaway from the PS5 presentation: “Okay, I guess this thing will be powerful as heck.”
