As part of a new Inside Xbox interview, Technical Director at Codemasters David Springate has offered some development insights on optimising the cross-gen Dirt 5 for Xbox Series X hardware. Stating that, "being able to play it with options for 120fps on Xbox Series X is incredible".

He notes that one of the main reasons and benefits that have come from the new hardware go beyond AMD's ray-tracing capable GPU - the Zen 2 processor plays an important role.

"Framerate is obviously key in a racing game," David says. "You get a stronger sense of speed and responsiveness at higher frame rates. 120fps seemed crazy to me at first, when Xbox told me that Xbox Series X could support 120fps, I thought 'Sure, for something a little more simple perhaps… Perhaps a simple arcade game or something…'."

"Some people have a misconception that frame times and performance are limited to just how fast your GPU is, but CPU performance is obviously critical too," David adds. "It would be no good if you had a GPU that can render beautiful visuals at 4K at 120fps if you don’t have a CPU that can generate enough frame data to render that quickly on the GPU."



The CPU also then plays a role in physics and AI and other flourishes. For David an the team they were shocked at how quickly they were able to get the game running at 120fps, where without optimisation it was regularly hitting this threshold. It's unclear at this stage if the resolution drops to 1080p to hit this, but Dirt 5 will run natively in 4K at 60fps on the Series X at a minimum.

David also notes that the fast SSD storage has been a revelation too, "It’s not like a PC SSD, it’s more than that. Being able to load data so ridiculously fast is not only really impressive but as a developer, it’s very interesting. For Dirt 5, we’re going to be able to get into races super fast. It means no loading screens getting in the way, no dawdling, no looking at my phone, it means that the action will be non-stop."

Dirt 5 takes full advantage of Xbox Velocity Architecture too, which allows developers to treat "GPU memory like a virtual disk".