The Coalition’s Technical Director, Mike Rayner was recently on stage at E3 Coliseum in an interview with Microsoft’s Larry Hryb. He talked about their development experience for the Xbox One X and how much time it took them to port the game there.
According to Rayner, the developers were able to get the game up and running on the Xbox One X within a single day. All of the basic functionality was up and running for them including the multiplayer and when they made the game run at 4K on the Xbox One, they still had additional performance headroom to improve the core visuals, which they did.
Rayner then explains the new additions to Gears of War 4 on the Xbox One including improved screen space reflections, improved dynamic shadowing system and 4K textures. While the game still runs at 30 FPS on the Xbox One X, these are still significant improvement especially the resolution which has increased from native 1080p from Xbox One to native 4K on the Xbox One X. The game also supports Dolby Atmos for those who have the necessary setup for it.
Rayner also talked about the development difficulty of porting a game to something like PC where there are multiple configurations to keep in mind compared to something like Xbox One X with a closed hardware and single configuration. While the game runs at 4K and 30 fps on the Xbox One X for single player, the developers are sticking with 60 fps for the multiplayer due to competitive gaming and e-sports making it a necessity.
