I just wanted to make a post about how disappointed I am in the lack of adoption/utilization of Xbox technologies by MS and 3rd parties thus far this generation.
At the beginning of the generation, when MS announced the Series X.. they did an excellent job of "marketing" the features of the console. I loved their fancy name for their architecture.
The VELOCITY Architecture
DirectStorage - a new I/O subsystem allowing them to unleash the power and speed of the SSD.
Dedicated hardware decompression block - ensuring lightning fast loading and smaller game storage footprints.
Sampler Feedback Streaming - texture asset loading in fine granularity, multiplier for storage bandwidth.
New Graphics Features
Variable Rate Shading - more efficient shading, saving resources for the parts of the image that actually matter most.
Mesh Shaders - to enable geometric detail never before thought possible.
DXR Ray Tracing - Hardware accelerated Ray Tracing support
DirectML - Machine learning hardware support for advanced ML algorithms (reconstruction, AI, ect)
System Features
Quick Resume - Quickly switch between multiple games on the go.
VRR - support dynamic variable refreshrates improving latency and screen tearing.
Now.. both of the system features have gotten very good and extensive use. Quick Resume and VRR are great additions.. not going to dispute that. However the rest of the features of the console have felt completely invisible. The Velocity architecture hasn't really been utilized at all yet. Games basically load as quick as they would if they were on PC with a similar speed SSD and CPU. We're 2 years into the generation and there's still no big Xbox exclusives advertising that they're taking complete advantage of the Velocity Architecture, and actually demonstrating something mindblowing with it. No games utilizing Sampler Feedback Streaming to reduce texture footprint and push vastly higher detail. There's no games with Mesh Shaders proudly touting their advanced geometry and object counts..
Variable Rate Shading has gotten some use, but it's mostly been a negative with some varying levels of quality, and largely considered a crutch that Xbox was leaning on during it's first year on the market..
And then there's Ray Tracing. Outside of Forza Horizon 5, which lets be honest... has a pathetic RT implementation... there's NOTHING from Xbox taking advantage of this stuff. Even Minecraft, which was working in prototype, was apparently scrapped and never did release.
So basically you have a whole bunch of nothing from MS so far. Now I know people will say that they haven't really begun to release their next gen games yet... but we're 2 years in, and whether all of this stuff comes year 3 or not... it's pretty sad that we haven't seen any of this stuff bear fruit.
Perhaps now with DirectStorage on PC, and the new wave of fully next gen/PC only titles coming, we'll see them start to tout this stuff... but I'm skeptical. DirectStorage on PC feels like something tangibly cool... whereas on Xbox feels... just like it's just matching up to where PC was. I hope I'm wrong about that and that we start seeing some real next level ideas and stuff come from MS that take advantage of this soon.