Russian game developer and publisher Gaijin Entertainment has the most Xbox Series X/S optimized games on launch day (with the exception of Microsoft, of course) according to the official list. Customers who have pre-ordered their next-generation Xbox console will be able to enjoy full-fledged enhancements for Gaijin's premiere vehicle combat game War Thunder, the squad-based first-person MMO Enlisted (which will debut in Closed Beta as part of the Game Preview program and also feature NVIDIA RTX and DLSS 2.0 support on PC), and Cuisine Royale.
With only a few weeks to go before November 10th, we reached out to Gaijin to get some extra details on these Xbox Series X/S enhancements straight from CEO Anton Yudintsev.
A recent screenshot of Enlisted.Can you give us an overview of how Gaijin is utilizing the hardware of Xbox Series X and S?
Hardware RT support enhances our Global Illumination solution. Games run in 4K@60fps on Xbox Series X (1440@60 on Series S), smooth and rich in visual fidelity.
Currently, we have our GI implementation, sound occluding system and AO which benefits a lot from RT hardware. GI and AO run in fixed resolution. There is no doubt that there are more features to benefit from RT-enabled hardware, we are working on them.
We have had a rather short period of time to work with the new hardware, so maybe not all RT-features will be available on Day1, but our games are digitally distributed live-op online games, so most likely by the time people read this answer, there will be all that and maybe even more RT-features in the game.
SSD and Velocity allow us to use higher resolution textures/meshes. SSD also gives very short loading times.
Will these versions enjoy even faster load times compared to playing Gaijin titles on PC (with an SSD)?
PC is not a fixed platform, so it is practically impossible to answer that question. But it does provide very short loading times.
Are you using other DirectX12 Ultimate features such as Variable Rate Shading (VRS), Mesh Shading, and Sampler Feedback on Xbox Series consoles?
Yes, at the moment we are using VRS with Mesh Shading and Sampler Feedback on the way.
What are the chances to see those ported on the PC version of your Gaijin games?
At the moment we are more focused on using these features on Xbox Series. DirectX 12 Ultimate for PC is at a very early stage (until recently it was available only for developers), so these features in our games are coming to PC somewhen next year.
What do you think about other touted Xbox Series S/X features such as the Project Acoustics audio engine and DirectML support? Which one sounds more interesting to you?
We are likely to use DirectML support in the foreseeable future. Project Acoustics is interesting, but we don’t have any immediate plans for it.
Thank you for your time.