Xbox Series X and Series S have been on the market for over 1 year now, but Microsoft has not stopped working on solutions that can improve the performance of the two next-generation consoles, far from it. For example, during the last session of the conference Game Stack dedicated to developers has emerged as a new implementation of Variable Rate Shading could be to improve substantially the performance of both consoles.
Let’s talk about the VRS 2.0who was the protagonist of a session of over 1 hour – just below you can find the complete video – in which developers of the Xbox team, id Software and The Coalition took part, who intervened to illustrate the first results of the implementation of the VRS 2.0 on some popular titles.
For example, both DOOM Eternal that Gears 5 they showed a 33% performance increase as regards the rendering capabilities through the use of the Epic Games Nanite tool, which allowed to render the same scenes in a much shorter time and with a graphic quality practically identical to that achieved with traditional techniques. In another example, a 45% performance increase (on Xbox Series X) during the management of a day / night cyclein particular in all those phases of the cycle (sunrise and sunset) in which the calculations of the shadows are more intense and heavy.
Despite these leaps so high, the overall effect of VRS 2.0 should allow a general improvement in game performance of between 10 and 15%, going to improve the frame rate of the titles without affecting too much on the visual quality. Probably this margin could be of great help mainly for the Xbox Series S, which seems to struggle a bit in the most recent games as in the case of Dying Light 2, but not only.
The implementation of VRS 2.0 should lead important benefits in several scenarios that make very intensive use of the GPU and ray tracing technology, currently very limited on consoles. The Variable Rate Shading, already in its current version, allows you to optimize the workload of the GPU, making the graphics hardware work more efficiently when it has to manage effects such as pixel shading and also allows you to benefit from a scaling of the dynamic resolution and localized to some precise elements.
