Jason Ronald’s job title is partner director of program management for the Xbox platform team, but what that somewhat robotic label boils down to is he’s leading development of the Xbox Series X, Microsoft’s next-generation console due out in time for Christmas 2020. He’s played a key role in the making of the Xbox Series X, from the beginning to the present, its hardware to its software. Nobody knows Xbox Series X like Jason Ronald.
Ahead of Microsoft’s reveal of some of the third-party games coming to the system, we had an extensive chat with Ronald to quiz him on everything from power to price, from concern over Xbox Series X games being constrained by having to work on the lowest common denominator (Xbox One), to the creation of the Xbox Series X’s shiny new boot screen itself.
Xbox Series X Gameplay First Look – Xbox Series X Reaction and Analysis Watch on YouTube
You have talked about obviously more powerful visuals for games, ray tracing, virtually instant loading. But does the Xbox Series X enable any sort of gameplay innovations we haven’t seen before or are not possible on any other platforms?
Jason Ronald: The answer is kind of yes across the board. Obviously, with all the advances we have in GPU power and GPU efficiency, not only is it the raw power, but it’s also the innovations on top of that, things like ray tracing for better lighting, better reflections, higher quality shadows, as well as more immersive audio experiences. You also have things like variable rate shading. Beyond the raw power we’re delivering, we’re giving developers a lot of tools to be that much more efficient in how they use the power we’re giving them.
But the real game changers from a gameplay and a game design perspective are actually on the CPU on the IO (data transfer speed) side. Today’s current generation titles often are bottlenecked on the CPU on the IO side, and it’s really constraining what you do as a game designer. And sometimes you have to arbitrarily change your creative vision to work within the constraints. But as you think about things like more and more open world games, more living, dynamic universes that players spend time in, we wanted to remove the technology barriers and enable developers to do super creative things. And really, that innovation is going to be on the CPU on the IO side. The CPU on the IO sides are also the areas that are usually least scalable from a game engine perspective.