Inside The New Xbox Series X|S With Microsoft's Jason Ronald - GDC Podcast

On GDC Podcast episode 15, we're featuring an interview with Jason Ronald, director of program management for the Xbox platform team. This is the guy who led development of the new Xbox Series X and S. He'll give us background into the development of Microsoft's powerful new consoles and talk about how the company designed the hardware with game developers in mind. Mm, back in a sec. Hey everybody, this is Chris Graft, editor-in-chief of Gamasutra. And it's just me this week. I am so sorry. Alyssa's coming back next time. Uh, but for now we're doing something a bit different with this episode. Uh, we're featuring audio from an interview I did with Jason Ronald, the guy who led and

actually is continuing to lead development on the new Xbox Series X and S. Uh, but first a real quick GDC PSA. We've just opened up submissions for core concept talk pitches for GDC 2021, which means if you have ideas for advocacy, audio, business and marketing, design, production, team management, programming and visual arts, uh, then you should apply. Uh, due to the fluid situation with the pandemic, you know, this is currently planned as a hybrid physical/virtual event, and GDC will be taking everyone's safety into consideration as such. So, you can find out more on GDC's official website, as usual, at gdconf.com. And with that, here's my chat with Jason Ronald. Chris, I think you and I have met in the past. Um, but in case we haven't, just introducing myself. Uh, my name is Jason

Ronald. I'm the director of program management for the Xbox platform team uh and leading development of the Xbox Series X uh and Series S. Yeah, great. Yeah, we we may have crossed paths sometime in the past. Uh, wouldn't be surprised. So, can you just give a little bit more background about what exactly your role is on it? You know, what does what has your last uh few years uh looked like working on this thing? Sure. Um, yeah, I've actually been involved with the Xbox Series X and Series S from the very beginning. Um, you know, we started this program back in 2016 even before we had released the Xbox One X. And we really sat down at that time and really uh you know, had a lot of conversations internally as well as with our development partners all across the ecosystem. Really trying to understand and define what the future of gaming looks like. You know, in in the the developer feedback is a critical part of how we

design our programs, how we design our hardware, our development environment. Um, because at the end of the day, we really think of it as we have two primary customers uh for what we design and build here at Team Xbox. One is obviously the end gamer, but two is the developer because it's really important to us that we're providing the right technical capabilities, the right hardware, the right services to really enable developers to deliver on their creative vision. So, I basically been involved in the program since the very beginning uh all the way through launch next week. Now, what were some major points of the evolution of um, you know, serving the the developer between seven years ago when Xbox One came out and now when the Series S and X are coming out? Um, it's a great question. I mean, really for me I think with the Xbox One, you know, we really uh were trying to be kind of disruptive and think differently

about the ecosystem and how can we provide different experiences to different players. With the beginning of um Xbox Series X and Series S, we really sat down and really had, you know, deep conversations with our partners. You know, in many cases some of these partners we've had relationships for more than 20 years. So, we have long-term relationships with partners. And they're never uh hesitant to provide feedback to us on, you know, things that we could be doing differently, things that we could be doing better. We also want to sit down with them and really understand kind of where they see their franchises going or their technology stocks are going. Um and we take all of that feedback in very early in the design process. And I think over the Xbox One generation, we got a lot of feedback from developers of "Hey, you know, it'd be easier if we could do this." Or, you know, when we think about a next generation uh piece of hardware, here's some things uh that we're really interested in because our goal at our level is to really uh remove all the

technical barriers from a developer's creative vision. You know, and and so some examples of things that we heard through the Xbox One generation that really informed where we we were going with Xbox Series X and Series S is, you know, simple things like CPU performance. You know, developers want to build more dynamic, larger, living worlds, more complex AI, better AI better animation systems. And, you know, one of the pieces of feedback that we received was, you know, the GPU as an example on the Xbox One X was super powerful, but the CPU power was really kind of constraining their creative vision. Another good example is like IO performance. You know, we're really at the upper bounds of what's possible with a traditional rotational drive technology or traditional hard drives. So, you know, and when we think about, you know, what that was incurring on developers like having to force players down hallways or funnel them to an elevator or things like that. It was really constraining the game

design and the aspirations that developers had. So, that's what really resulted in things like the Xbox Velocity Architecture and betting on NVMe SSD level IO performance. And then clearly from a developer's perspective, you know, you always want to advance the state of the art in graphics. So, beyond just the raw power of the graphics, you know, we really invested in next-gen capabilities like DirectX ray tracing that's hardware accelerated, things like variable rate shading to really allow developers to get more fine-grained control and just really be able to get the best performance possible out of the hardware that we have there. And I think really for us it's the marrying of the hardware innovation with the software innovation and then the developer tools to just really empower developers to deliver on those creative visions. Yeah, very cool. So, when you are you know, showing your close development partners

these these new consoles and and early versions of them, what kind of reaction were you getting from them as you're bringing them these you know, near final versions? You know, we actually start before you know, we get to what you described as near final. You know, early on we kind of sit down with them and we say, "Hey, here's the performance targets that we want to go target. You know, here's some of the technologies that we're planning on leaning into. Are these exciting for you? Are they in your technology road maps?" And the reality is that since these are you know, we have regular conversations with them, we're usually pretty aligned. And then when once we're kind of uh you know, getting further along in development and the hardware starts becoming real and we really start understanding what the the capabilities are, then we also sit down with them and really talk about like, how can we make the development process itself easier? You know, when like one one set of key decisions that we made very early on in

the program is, you know, as a large developer, even as a small developer, you know, you have an investment in your tool chains and your development process, in your QA labs. So, one of the things that we did is the exact same tools that developers were using on the Xbox One generation, those exact same tools work on the Xbox Series X and Series S uh generation. Even with things like the development the design of the development kit, we designed it so that you could basically uh remove an Xbox One development kit, put an Xbox Series X development kit in, and then plug everything right in and it's just up and working. So, it was really about how do we make this transition to this next generation as easy as possible. And like one story that I I always like to share, we worked with the Coalition earlier this year, and they were able to basically get Gears 5 up and running on an Xbox Series X development kit within like 3 to 4 weeks. Uh which in normal console generation transitions, that's

kind of unheard of. A lot of times there's a lot of engine rework you need to do or tool chain work you need to redo, but we really wanted to make this as easy as possible. So, they were able to get the game up and running very quickly, and then it was really about, "Okay, how do I take advantage of all this new power, all these new capabilities?" But, they didn't have to go learn a completely new tool chain or rebuild, you know, how they actually build the game. We We really made a point to make it as easy as possible. Yeah. So, all this transitionary stuff is interesting to me. Like, uh when for example with the Coalition, you're talking about Gears 5, uh what are some of the you know, the bigger changes to the workflow when you say that it it took them 4 weeks? What are they doing during that time to get this ready for the Series X and S? Yeah, I mean to be honest it's it wasn't a significant amount of work. You know, we do have a standard SDK that we deliver to all of

our development partners and all our engine middleware partners. So I think the early days is just really kind of giving everything up and running on the latest SDK. You know, we try to minimize API changes as much as possible. The other thing too is we also recognize that a large portion of game developers do a lot of their development on PC. So we really looked at kind of like the API design and the workflows and the designs on how people actually build their games on PC to make it easier whether you're starting with say an Xbox One generation code base or a PC code base. We want to make it as easy as to get your games up and running. And then once the game is up and running, like I said, then you know, a lot of times we talk about it as kind of the time until you can see the first pixels on the screen. You can just start getting whether it's a white box environment or it's an existing game, you know, just getting it up and running. And then all the same performance tools, all the same deployment tools, all the same configuration. So it's you know, we

really didn't want to make make it so developers had to relearn things. It's really about getting your game up and running and then just really starting to explore some of these new capabilities and figuring out what's right for the title. You know, the nice thing about with the hardware performance that we have, you know, once you get the game up and running, one of the first things that developers always do is they turn everything to 11. You know, they they max out their frame rate, they max out their their resolution. You know, and and they start doing performance tuning, and then in most cases they have a lot of headroom available to them, and that's when all of a sudden it's like, "Okay, looking at my development schedule, maybe I want to lean into ray tracing." Or hey, there's this feature that we've been incubating internally, let's bring that into the engine or bring that into the game. So, it's really about empowering them to be efficient and powerful on day and then just really helping them deliver on that creative vision that they've been carrying for many years.

So, kind of back to the development of these Xboxes, when you're when you're you're mapping out plan for for these new ones, what were the you know, the biggest technical hurdles that you knew you would have to address when coming to the final version? Um, I don't know if I'd call them technical hurdles, but what I would say is we were very deliberate in the design decisions that we made. You know, one thing is developers today often have a lot of really great tools and capabilities of doing things like scaling up and down on resolution or enabling or disabling different visual effects, especially if they ship on multiple devices or they ship on PC and console. So, you know, what was really clear to us was the things that developers had a harder time scaling were things like CPU performance and IO performance. So, when we designed the

two consoles, we actually designed them to effectively be symmetrical in CPU performance and IO performance because we wanted to make it as easy as possible to develop for developers to scale their games up and down across the Series X and the Series S. And I think it's a win-win because I think what us with developers, we all want to reach the largest addressable audience of players possible. So, we saw an opportunity to deliver a premium next generation gaming console in the Xbox Series X, but we also realized that we could deliver next-gen performance just at a reduced rendering resolution. But, as a game developer, you know, like I said, they already have the knobs, they already have the ability to scale up and down on the visual side, but by making those the CPU and the IO subsystems symmetrical, we really took a lot of work off of developers. And then I think the other thing, too, is as we've designed our tools, as we've designed our APIs, we're also really focused on how do we make it easy for developers to move their game from, say,

the console to the PC or the PC to the console and even to the cloud. So, with things like Direct Storage, which is a brand new API that we created for the Xbox Series X and Series S, that gives developers a lot more fine-grained control of how they leverage the IO subsystem, we're bringing that exact same capability to the PC. Because as a developer, I want to make sure that I have a common set of capabilities and a common set of techniques that I can use, and I don't want to have to dramatically change my game. So, this is really kind of leaning into where developers want and how they want to build their games, regardless of what what their starting point is or whether they make a console-only game or they make a game that will actually ship across multiple devices. Mhm. So, right now, you know, we're seeing these games that are existing and they're being optimized like Gears 5, which by the way looks looks incredible and plays great. Uh

I'm wondering when the the games that are coming out that are for, you know, in a couple years that are for Xbox Series X and S, um I'm I'm curious how when these games are utilizing more of the consoles like power, uh you know, how is that going to affect the experience when they're introducing bigger, more complex worlds? How might that affect the the player experience in terms of like frame rates, load time, resolution, things like that? Yeah, I mean, ultimately, when it comes to frame rates and resolution, we really view that as a creative decision by the game developer. They know their their franchise, they know the world that they're trying to create. They also know their player base, and they know, you know, what really matters to them and how how do we package those things together. And I think to your point, you know, as a system designer, the thing that's really exciting is, you know, I totally agree with what you said. I think Gears 5 is stunning, it plays

great, all the work they did on latency improvements, and just running it like the the peak performance. But that's the game that you're going to see on day one. What's really exciting is where I see games going two, three, four years down the road. Because when you design a console hardware platform, you're really setting the technical direction for the next seven to 10 years of game development. So, we really designed the hardware in such a way that we're thinking about where games can be going. You know, right now a lot of the a lot of the positive press and the feedback we're getting from developers is really on the massive improvements in load times. But that's in many cases just really leveraging the raw hardware capabilities that the SSD drive brings to bear. But when you think about what we've actually done with the Xbox Velocity Architecture, it was a radical rethink of how game streaming can and should work with an eye towards these larger, more dynamic, living worlds. Where basically, you know, there's entire classes of assets that you don't

even need to load into memory anymore because we have that ultra-fast IO between the processor and the IO subsystem. You know, you also think about things like, you know, as a developer, developers always would love more memory, more GPU, more CPU horsepower. You know, a huge part for us is the efficiency. So, you know, for us it's critically important that we have consistent sustained clocks. So, developers don't have to worry about variable performance because that that makes it harder to optimize your game, you know, whether you're in intense firefight or you're in just kind of a another part of the world. We also look at things like variable rate shading like I mentioned before. It's really about, you know, obviously we're really proud of the the raw GPU performance that we have, but it's how can we let developers be even more efficient in how they use that power. So, with something like variable rate shading, if something's in shadow or it's, you know, got motion blur or whatnot, you probably don't need that

same level of precision for that area of this of the frame, but now I can take that extra power that I'm not I'm not applying to that area of the frame and putting it in my hero character or objects that are closer to the camera. So, it really allows us to deliver performance well beyond the raw hardware specs themselves. Um, and I think you'll see, you know, over the course of the generation, you'll really see both us and developers really understanding how to take full advantage of all these capabilities to really deliver transformative gaming experiences unlike anything you've seen before. So, maybe fewer elevators and fewer uh long hallways and narrow narrow paths. Ab- absolutely. And and I mean, if you just look at the trends in games, you know, you know, even the games that are at the the tail end of the Xbox One generation, you look at an Assassin's Creed Odyssey, you look at a Red Dead Redemption 2, you know, these are massive living worlds that players want to be immersed in. And for us, immersion is another keyword that we really

established very early on in the program. It's like, how can we cre- uh keep players really immersed in the universes that these world-class creators are building all around the world? I've read some of what you said about backwards compatibility, but let's let's touch on that. Uh Can you Can you speak to you know how how it exactly works in this new hardware and why it's so important as far as Xbox's overarching strategy, guys? Sure. So, you know, compatibility was another key pillar that we established very early in the program because as I've said before, you know, there's no other medium whether it's movies or music or books that when I go out and buy a new device that my content doesn't move forward with me. And games have been one of those only types of content that haven't that haven't been able to do that. So, we actually consider that when we design the hardware. And one of the things that we're really proud of is that when games are running on the Xbox Series X and

Series S, they're running with the full performance of the Xbox Series X and Series S. So, they're running at the full clock rates, they're running at the full CPU performance, they have access to the full IO performance. And what that allows us to do is that allows us to actually run the games better than they've ever been run before, oftentimes even further than the original hardware that they were originally designed for. So, one of the critical things that's important to us though is that we never violate that artistic intent of that original creator. So, you know, we're never going to run a game at say, you know, ultra high frame rates and then, you know, the game doesn't feel the same or doesn't look the same or you get visual artifacts. And the only way that we can achieve that achieve that is through a tremendous amount of testing that we do across the entire catalog of games. And I think it just really comes down to, you know, for us a real player-centric approach as opposed to a device centric approach. It's not about selling more copies, it's

not about, you know, oh, I I want this player to, you know, purchase a remastered version. If somebody's invested their time and their money into our ecosystem, we want to respect that. And then I also think of it as, you know, it's preservation. You know, there's so many games that I have from my childhood or over the last 10 to 15 years that I just love and I have these really strong memories about them. And, you know, I should be able to go back and play them. And like one of the things that's always been magical for me with the Series X and Series S is I can take a game from my back catalog, download it, put it on the console, and then my game saves instantly available to me. And I might not have played the game for 5 or 6 years, but I'm instantly taken back exactly to where I was, you know, 5 or 6 years ago. And then, you know, maybe I'll finish the game or maybe I'll play the game again. Um and that's the thing, it's it's it's about preserving that art form that we love. Um and that's why I think most of us are in this industry is because we really view it as an art form.

Yeah. Yeah, I was surprised when I started playing Mass Effect and then uh you know, on three for 360 and then my my old save loaded up. So, that was a nice uh nice surprise. Totally. Wrapping up, moving forward, what you know, what are the next steps for you and the people working out on the technical side of the console? Uh are you Are you thinking about, you know, what's next? Um you know, it's it's a funny question. I mean, in many ways, launch is just the beginning. I mean, clearly it's taken a tremendous amount of time and a tremendous amount of work from thousands of people to to get us to launch next week. Um but we're just beginning, you know, and like I said, you know, the the launch games are definitely taking full advantage of the power that we're delivering and some of the next gen features. But, you know, the average game takes 3 to 4 years to make now. So, we're already working with titles for the second holiday and third holiday. You know, obviously we're working really closely with all the the major middleware vendors to make sure that the

engines are fully optimized to take advantage of all this great next-gen capabilities that we have. And then, you know, we're always thinking about what's next. Um, you know, we're we're really listening to developers, we're really listening to players, and our goal is to just really deliver the most premium gaming experience that we can for, you know, the 2.5 billion people across the world who play games. You know, in some cases that's going to be the console, and the console's going to be the best-in-class experience. In other cases, it might be, you know, somebody's more PC-centric, and we want to make sure we're great there. And then for a large number of people, it's giving them access to this wealth of, you know, this huge catalog of content that we have through things like Project xCloud, um, and enabling people who maybe have never played or have never been able to play certain franchises, you know, allowing them to jump in and just really experience that. So, we're always thinking about the future. We're really excited about the future. Uh, but next week is really just the beginning of

this journey. Uh, but we couldn't be more excited about it. Really appreciate you taking some time. It's been enlightening.