While at E3, during Microsoft’s Xbox conference, the company’s Executive President of Gaming, Phil Spencer, announced that the company is already working on its next gaming console, which is expected to be unveiled in 2019 and released in 2020. Little is known about the console (or rather, family of devices), although, Spencer recently gave some further insight into his vision of console gaming in the future.
During a discussion with Giant Bomb, Spencer talked about frame rates. There’s a bit of a difference between PC and console gaming. On console, a lot of games don’t make use of 60 fps as a minimum, as developers make use of increased performance capacity to be more ambitious with their games instead.
I think frame rate is an area where consoles can do more. Just in general. When you look at the balance between CPU and GPU in today’s consoles they’re a little bit out of whack relative to what’s on the PC side. So I think there’s work that we can do there.
In addition to frame rates, and something that alludes more towards Microsoft’s game streaming service it has been working on, Spencer discussed how he wants to see games load quicker, giving State of Decay as an example, saying that despite being notified it’s “Ready to Start”, he only gets to sit at a title screen:
I’m always wishing games would start quicker. We’re as guilty as anybody … one game I’m playing a ton of, State of Decay, it says ‘Ready to Start’ and I get to [sit at the title screen] and install the rest of the game.
Microsoft is already working on some of Spencer’s problems. For example, at E3 the company announced its AI-powered FastStart feature, that aims to use AI to load games quicker.
