As we mentioned yesterday, the next big tech meeting in video games will be the Game Developers Conference in mid-March. And as every year, the content of the conferences may give us clues to what is going on for the next few months and years in video games.
[Mise à jour du 08/03/2020]
We knew since the end of February that the Xbox Series X would be entitled to hardware specifically dedicated to its audio part, and it is also an engineer from Ninja Theory who confirms the thing.
It’s extremely exciting. We’re going to have a dedicated chip to work with audio, which means we won’t have to fight with programmers and artists for memory and processor power.
Daniele Galante, sound designer at Xbox Ninja Theory studio (Hellblade, Hellblade II) confirmed therefore the potential of the future Xbox as for its audio part. According to him, it is a question of overcoming potential limits even if the new hardware will be much more powerful than any Xbox today.
The next generation of consoles will therefore not only be played on the graphic part, but also on the audio part, for ever more immersion in the games.
Original article from February 20, 2020
One of the conferences planned for the GDC will take place on March 18. Robert Ridihalgh, audio specialist at Microsoft, will discuss the subject of audio spatialization to create immersive worlds for an hour.
Learn from audio designers in Borderlands 3 and Gears of War 5 how a collaboration between Microsoft, Dolby and our middleware partners has sparked a revolution in spatial sound that turns any pair of headphones into a multidimensional gateway to another world. Participants will explore audio design (Project Acoustics) and the relationship with dedicated hardware acceleration on next-generation Xbox consoles.
What is interesting here is that the conference pitch confirms that the new generation of Xbox, aka Xbox Series X will benefit from hardware acceleration for its audio part. Sony, for its part, already announced something similar last April through Mark Cerny. The latter had confirmed to Wired that the AMD chip in the PS5 would benefit from a dedicated unit for “3D audio”, which would allow ever greater immersion in video games. The next-gen battle will therefore not only take place on the graphics with Ray Tracing, but also on the audio part, very often put aside, and yet just as necessary in a game.
All about the Xbox Series X
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