Microsoft revealed the raw specs for the Xbox Series X a long time ago, but the raw specs only tell half the story. Better hardware means better performance, but unless those components play well together, it’s entirely possible to have a system that feels less than the sum of its parts. To ensure that the Xbox Series X takes full advantage of each of its powerful parts, Microsoft has implemented a system called Velocity Architecture.
In an Xbox Wire blog post, Jason Ronald, director of program management for Xbox Series X, explained how Velocity Architecture works. Basically, Velocity Architecture leverages four somewhat disparate technological advancements to ensure faster load times for larger, more complex environments. These four components are the custom system SSD, enhanced decompression, custom application programming interfaces (APIs), and Sampler Feedback Streaming (SFS), all of which can help textures load more efficiently.
Ronald wrote his post with a lay audience in mind, but it’s still pretty technical, so we’ll try to break it down a bit more. For an overview of Velocity Architecture’s features, the Xbox team compiled a short video:
The Xbox X Series Custom SSD is probably something you’ve read about before. The Xbox One used a standard hard drive, which is relatively slow compared to its solid-state cousins. In addition to the standard SSD benefits, the Xbox Series X storage will offer “consistent and sustained performance” that will process inputs and outputs up to 40 times more efficiently than the Xbox One. In practical terms, this means faster load times, as well as a system that manages heat more efficiently.
Hardware accelerated decompression is a little more difficult to explain. When a game loads assets, it must decompress data, as filling a game with uncompressed assets would be time consuming and difficult to manage. Such a game would also take up an unprecedented amount of hardware space. The Xbox Series X will employ a custom algorithm that could offer input / output processing that is 100 times more efficient than that of the Xbox One.
The next step is the new DirectStorage API, which will work hand in hand with the SSD and the latest version of DirectX to prioritize input / output processes more efficiently. A deep dive into this topic would take too long to explain here, but a concrete benefit of this technology could be much faster fast travel systems in open world games.
Finally, there’s Sampler Feedback Streaming, which deals with textures. Anyone who has played the same game on both a console and a PC knows how different textures can look, depending on how much processing power you have for them. Streaming sample comments can direct more resources towards loading textures, even if they are away from the player, which means smoother transitions and less pop-in when a player approaches an object.
These features sound a bit similar to what Sony described for the PS5 during its Road to PS5 presentation in March, which focused largely on benefits like SSD fast charging and immersive 3D audio. But given the slightly more powerful Xbox Series X specs (which include 12 teraflops of graphics power compared to the PS5’s 10.3), we’re eager to see how the two compare in real-world use.
As for what these game-by-game innovations will mean, we’ll have to wait and see. Faster load times appear to be the most immediate benefit, but as developers become more familiar with the Xbox Series X architecture, we could also see improvements in level design and immersion.
