The Technology Behind Xbox One

As a long-time Microsoft employee and now the CTO of EA, I found yesterday’s unveiling of the new Xbox One exciting on a few different levels. Following on the footsteps of Sony’s announcement of the new PlayStation 4, these new technologies finally raise the curtain on the next generation of interactive entertainment. This is a significant inflection point in the history of our industry. One that is as profound as the introduction of smartphones or Facebook to the market. My colleagues Frank Gibeau and Peter Moore shared their thoughts on what this means for the industry as a whole yesterday, but I’d like to take a deeper dive into the technical implications of these new platforms for our games and game engines.

It all begins with the raw horsepower of the platform which catalyzes the imagination and will power the next wave of innovation in entertainment. Both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 have adopted electronics and an integrated systems-on-a -chip (soc) architecture that unleashes magnitudes more compute and graphics power than the current generation of consoles. These architectures are a generation ahead of the highest end PC on the market and their unique design of the hardware, the underlying operating system and the live service layer create one of the most compelling platforms to reimagine game mechanics. Our benchmarks on just the video and audio performance are 8-10 times superior to the current gen. The compute capabilities of these platforms and the data transfer speeds we can now bank on, essentially removes any notion of rationing of systems resources for our game engines. Yesterday, we introduced the new EA SPORTS IGNITE engine. We also announced the next generation of our Frostbite engine which powers many of our titles including Battlefield and Need For Speed. Both these engines have been tailored to take full advantage of the new capabilities of the Xbox One and PS4. For a first-person shooter game like Battlefield 4, this means even more detailed gameplay, behavior and awareness for characters and more detailed appearance down to the lighting and clothing on the soldiers. EA SPORTS gamers will experience true motion with pivoting, side stepping, step based locomotion and bio mechanics that account for mass, center of gravity and momentum; human intelligence that simulate instincts, awareness and unpredictability that’s more like real-life sport.

Videogames are about to become a medium like you’ve never seen. For example, in the real world, when an athlete takes the field or court during a playoff game and the crowd is going wild, they feed off of that energy and it impacts how they perform. Take the Warriors’ “Roaracle Arena,” for example – the players have said that the crowd energy directly impacted how they performed in the playoffs. CenturyLink Field where the Seattle Seahawks play is often referred to as the 12th man for the same reason. With our next gen game engines, the crowd energy, weather and player behavior will all impact how your gameplay unfolds.The technology powering these games takes realism to a whole new level.

These next-gen platforms create dynamic, living worlds. Your game could change overnight depending on actions by other gamers around the globe. Your player stats and information can be updated in real time with real-world player stats and injury reports. These consoles are also inherently more social – something that didn’t matter much when the last consoles came out eight years ago. You’re reading this on a social network right now; you’re much more likely to want to connect with your friends and share stats and achievements than ever before. I previously wrote about how social connectivity is a secular force that is changing the industry – and now we’re really going to see that take off.

Last but not the least, the power of connected data is going to be an integral part of the gaming experience – I’ve written before about how data-heavy games can be. We see 2.5B monthly game sessions and 50 TB of daily telemetry data on our network alone. The Xbox Live network required 500 servers when it launched a decade ago and as was mentioned yesterday, they are now provisioning 300,000 servers to handle Xbox data in the cloud. That growth is staggering, but it also means we’ll really start to see more examples of true cross-device play. Sony showed off the ability through their cloud gaming functionality to allow gamers to play high-end console titles on the handheld Vita product. The architecture of both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 present more opportunities to take your game from TV to smartphone to PC, with seamless ubiquity and experience gaming at any time, in any way on any device.

You don’t have to be an engineer or even a gamer like me to appreciate the power of these new devices. The technological power of the device sitting under your TV has never presented more opportunity, and is poised to change entertainment as we know it.

Congratulations to my former colleagues at Microsoft for unveiling a device with exceptional industrial design and taking videogame technology into a new era. And congratulations to our partners at Sony who have showcased the future of open architecture and cloud gaming.

It’s an exciting time to be in this space at this moment in history.

Photo courtesy of CNET/ CBS Interactive