Xbox Series X|S just gained this great feature, but you'll have to wait to benefit from it

By Sean Endicott
published

The Xbox Series X|S now supports several additional graphics features from AMD, bringing big benefits to gamers.

Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S
Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S (Image credit: Matt Brown | Windows Central)

What you need to know

  • The Xbox Series X|S Game Development Kit now supports select FidelityFX effects.
  • Game developers can now build Contrast Adaptive Sharpening, Variable Shading, and AMD's ray-traced shadow Denoiser into games on the consoles
  • It could be quite some time before gamers see the benefits of the newly added support.

Microsoft's Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S just gained support for several new graphics features. AMD announced that select FidelityFX effects are now available in the latest Xbox Series X|S Game Development Kit (GDK). With support for the FidelityFX effects, game developers can add Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS), Variable Shading, and AMD's ray-traced shadow Denoiser to games on the consoles.

The Xbox Series X and Series are built on the same AMD RDNA 2 architecture as the AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series of graphics cards. FidelityFX is already available on some PCs, and AMD is bringing the technology over to Xbox consoles featuring the latest AMD hardware.

AMD GPUOpen explains how Xbox consoles will benefit from the new support:

This news makes it even easier than before to write cross-platform games, with developers able to access select AMD FidelityFX effects with specific optimizations for Windows and Xbox. Game developers can now utilize further platform-specific optimizations with AMD FidelityFX, straight from the Xbox Series X|S Game Development Kit.

While this is a major addition to the Xbox consoles, gamers will have to wait to see the benefits of the FidelityFX support. Developing games takes time, as does integrating FidelityFX technology.

Despite the fact that the PS5 uses AMD hardware, there hasn't been an announcement regarding FidelityFX technology on Sony's console at this time.

Sean Endicott
Sean Endicott
News Writer and apps editor

Sean Endicott brings nearly a decade of experience covering Microsoft and Windows news to Windows Central. He joined our team in 2017 as an app reviewer and now heads up our day-to-day news coverage. If you have a news tip or an app to review, hit him up at sean.endicott@futurenet.com (opens in new tab).

2 Comments
  • This is really quite significant, and surprising that they're not announcing this for PS5 at the same time. This is what's needed for the real launch of Next Generation consoles. Before this update from AMD, they were both effectively just faster variants on the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X. Yes, they had the ray tracing hardware, but it still carried such a performance hit until this release that it was effectively unusable. Now they finally have functional drivers for ray tracing and the graphics boost that will allow for a truly differentiated visual experience from last-gen consoles. I suspect this will be further enhanced in updates later this year, but this is where it needed to start. I'm especially curious to see if MS makes any hay on this for the window while Xbox has this but PS5 does not. I suspect Sony will also get it very soon, so I wouldn't expect MS to brag about it too much, but still interested to watch what happens.
  • Now if we only had a Xbox Series in our hands to actually play. :-)