The news of a higher resolution UI for Xbox Series X owners has been welcomed. It's something that's been requested for a while now, and although it's beginning to roll out, some Xbox users have raised concerns it will take resources away from games. Fortunately, it's been confirmed that the new feature will not affect any titles running on the system.
Xbox Series X director of project management Jason Ronald answered some questions on Twitter, all of which sought out to identify whether the changes would have any negative connotations. According to Ronald, the higher resolution dashboard will not take any memory away from games, allowing all titles to run as usual.
As for the dashboard update, it's only available for Xbox Insider members at the moment. Much like every other update, we expect it to roll out to the public within the next few weeks, so expect to see it on a dashboard near you very soon.
Happy to see the dashboard doesn't affect game performance? Let us know in the comments below.
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Wonder if its a 'native' resolution upgrade or using some form of Upscaling - like FSR, Temporal Reconstruction or ML..
I was watching the weekly DF Direct and there was a piece about Control performing much better now on Series X despite no 'game' update leading the team to contemplate whether a 'System' update had improved it.
Exactly my question on here in yesterday’s post.
Well at least it isn’t.
1080p dashboard has never bothered me
@BAMozzy yeah I saw that and its pretty interesting, new drivers can increase performance on PC and as these consoles get ever closer to basically just being PC parts I can see how something similar could happen. Particularly with Xbox using DX12 and RDNA2, leaving room for optimisation in both since launch
Great news, just OS optimisations then.
After years of drastic iterations and constant tweaks the Xbox OS is very nice in general now, tbf I actually liked it along the way (although most didn't seem to), it just needed to get snappier, which it is.
I really enjoy the constant feature and QOL updates that we all benefit from too.
I'm just glad it is finally coming. Hopefully HDR will be enables so we don't have to deal with the flicker when changing.
The current, grainy, dash has been getting old.
@BAMozzy @SplooshDmg We already knew that Series X software stack was in a very early stage compared to PS5 which was initially planned to launch one year earlier and thus was in a more finished stage when both consoles launched. There were several developers confirming the same. Xbox had to wait for the full RDNA2 spec (confirmed by Xbox) which’s why the SDK was not fully ready. Alex mentions how some developers have mentioned performance boosts like with ray tracing and other areas. Looks like Series X performance will just get better and better (Velocity Architecture, Mesh Shading etc).
@SplooshDmg Of course that's entirely possible. DirectX12 Ultimate wasn't at its most optimised and 'ready' for the Series X release so improvements to that can and would have positive impact on games.
However, without any proof this alone is responsible for 'gains' in UI resolution or game performance I cannot definitively say its down to that. Its much easier to include that as a 'System' update as the API is part of that 'System'. Its also why the 'Xbox' was so named - Originally the DirectX Box.
It could also of been a 'bug' in the System or some 'background' system level operation that was not well optimised - causing performance hitches and/or using more resources than it 'should'. Stutters for example could be caused by the system running a check on files to ensure they are 'safe' - some security software causing a bit more slowdown than expected.
There could be other reasons behind this so its much easier to bunch all the Updates to the Xbox (whether its improving the UI, adding features or improving the API etc) as 'System' [level] updates.
All we know is that the UI can now run at a 'higher' resolution - but what resolution and how they achieved it, I don't know. Overlaying 4k Text isn't a massive jump in resources - its whether or not they are increasing resolution on Assets too or using ML upscaling, FSR, Temporal reconstruction or still keeping those at '1080p' and upscaling them in the 'usual' manner.
At the end of the day, text, especially if 'small' on screen can get incredibly difficult to see with the upscaling artefacts leading to 'blur'. The actual images in the tiles are still instantly recognisable so not so important. If you are shopping in the Store for example, you want to be able to read any 'small' print.
The reason I say this is because all MS have said is that they are increasing the Native resolution for increased sharpness and text legibility. Games can overlay a Native 4k HuD over a lower resolution game play so maybe that's what MS are doing here which probably wouldn't add a lot to the resource cost - a LOT less than making everything 4k with 4k quality assets too...
Hope not, since it is a non issue.
Couldn't they do this for the Xbox One?
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