In a recent interview with GameOnDaily, Dirt 5’s technical director went on to explain how the Xbox Series X’s I/O throughput and Velocity Architecture are almost on par with that of the PS5. You can check out the video down below.
During the conversation, Springate praised the storage in the Series X possible by the inclusion of Direct Storage API. He also recalled the demos that he did for Microsoft for feedback purposes and shared the results from his personal tests. Springate also believed that the results can be improved further.
“We look at all of these things all of the time. I can’t promise which stuff is going to come in future patches, because we have to balance loads of different things, but it might. That’s the best I can do. In terms of fast storage on Series X, I think that hardware is great, I worked on it with Microsoft early on and provided some feedback to them. I looked at the speed that we could get from it, you can get 10GB in two seconds in my personal early tests, it may well be able to do way better than that. And that was without the compression in the hardware, that was just raw.”
Springate was also asked about the low I/O throughput figure Microsoft advertises. He claimed that these were engineering challenges that creep in when considering that textures are to be loaded at once and not one-by-one and that the hardware or the API from Microsoft is not at fault.
“The way to get the most out of fast storage on all platforms is to make many requests at once. You want to load five hundred textures, forget loading one texture, you want to load them all. That then gives some challenges to how you layout your data. You need to know where they’re going to go in memory, you need to know what is it you need before you ask for it. That’s a challenge, it’s not hardware, it’s not the API from Microsoft or Sony, it’s an engineering challenge. We’re very close, we’ve done loads of testing, it’s not something I’m gonna come to saying it’ll come in a patch but it’s something I’m very interested in personally.”
What does this mean for the Xbox Series X?
The claims made by Springate from the testing done, point to the fact that many already believe to be true: Xbox Series X is faster than the PS5, if only by the slightest of margins. The Series X already has an edge over the PS5 in terms of backwards compatibility as it currently offers unmatched compatibility with the previous generations of Xbox. And the Series X will need all the advantages it can get over the PS5 if it wants to be the console champion.
Excellent