Since the launch of the Xbox Series S We have heard a lot of criticism about the console, and it is that it is a hardware that does not represent all the power that the consoles of this generation can offer because it obviously has a reduction in terms of performance as well as price, which prevents optimize well the games. The latest person to point out the problem this results in was Scott Junior, the CPO (Chief Product Officer) of Funcom, the developer of Dune: Awakening.
The midpoint of the current generation of consoles is approaching, a time when the main companies that sell this type of hardware must start releasing new products that offer greater power than they have now due to the technical requirements of the most anticipated upcoming games. And the problems that this generation’s consoles have to run new games with high requirements are increasingly noticeable, especially if we are talking about one that has practically a third of the power of the Xbox Series X.
Lower-powered hardware causes developers to struggle when optimizing games
As we could imagine from the beginning, people who are dedicated to creating games have a series of quite big problems when it comes to optimizing the various titles that we can find both on PC and consoles. And it is already difficult for a title to achieve stable 60 FPS on consoles due to the technical limitations that they may have with respect to high-end computers created specifically for gaming, mainly due to the graphics they incorporate as we well know.
This is even more complicated when the optimization has to reach a console that is completely different in power compared to the other from the same company, and the Xbox Series S is a console that as such was not created with the aim of running games locally, but as a project to take advantage of cloud functions. It is a type of hardware that allows many users to play titles that do not require too much optimization without problems, but Dune: Awakening is one of the ones that is having the most problems in this case.
Scott Junior mentioned during Gamescom that they had managed to get Funcom’s new game to run at a stable 60 FPS on the Xbox Series X, but it is being a much bigger challenge for the Series Ssince as we well know they have 4 TFLOPS while the Series X has 12 TFLOPS.
«It’s one of the reasons why we’re releasing the game on PC first. We have to optimize a lot of things before releasing it on Xbox. But yes, Xbox Series S It is a challenge.
In a way, Unreal does a lot of the work for us. What we mostly do is optimize assets and use various technologies, like FSR or others, to render the frames. We want the game to look impressive on the high end, whether you have a 3070 or a 4090, but we also want it to look good on lower specs.