If the next version of gaming consoles are telling us anything, it’s that these devices are becoming more and more aligned to their PC counterparts with regards to their internal components used and the speed of their specs. There’s no doubt that PCs are always going to be quicker and more advanced if you have loads of cash lying around, but for the average gamer, that closer parity between PCs and consoles is a good thing at ensuring they get a stable gaming performance regardless of what they play on.
It’s not all about hardware though, as Microsoft has revealed that their next graphics engine DirectX 12 Ultimate is bringing together a lot of the features that were typically reserved for high-performance PCs, to its new Xbox Series X consoles with an intention to bridge the graphical gap between the two:
It’s not a massive graphical leap forward if you’re a PC gamer, but with things like Ray Tracing 1.1 and support for the latest Nvidia and AMD cards and technologies, it certainly brings a lot of new things to the console universe, while at the same time working on PC and older Xbox hardware making things a lot easier for developers who can work off just one engineer across both the Microsoft console and Windows games. That is until PC gamers get even better and expensive hardware and move across to a different engine entirely.
When gamers purchase PC graphics hardware with the DX12 Ultimate logo or an Xbox Series X, they can do so with the confidence that their hardware is guaranteed to support all next-generation graphics hardware features, including DirectX Raytracing, Variable Rate Shading, Mesh Shaders and Sampler Feedback. This mark of quality ensures stellar ‘future-proof’ feature support for next-generation games
It’s great that Microsoft is trying to bridge the parity between its console and PC systems. It’s probably just the start of more features that will be coming our way to bring these two gaming worlds closer together.
