Stevivor recently learned how the Xbox One family of consoles will handle 4K assets and updates across digital delivery and ol’ fashioned retail discs in addition to saving regular Xbox One users space on their download quotas.
“Something that we’ve invested [in] quite a bit… is a feature we call Intelligent Title Delivery,” Kevin Gammill, Group Program Manager, Xbox Core Platform, explained. “It essentially lets developers be smarter about what gets installed based on what console it’s on.
“If you think of a studio and you have two sets of assets — you have your 1080p assets and your 4K assets — and I’m installing to an Xbox One X, there’s no reason you need those 1080p assets; they won’t get downloaded.
“Cutscenes are another good example — many cutscenes often localise their audio into a bunch of different languages. I know that there are consoles in French that only download cutscenes in the French language version. We had a third-party recently take advantage of this and they were able to shave about 12GB of what would typically get downloaded to the user’s hard drive by taking advantage of this feature It’s about a 45GB title, so [that is] pretty significant.”
The Intelligent Title Delivery system was detailed by Digital Foundry yesterday.
Gammill confirmed that those with an Xbox One X will download 4K assets, regardless of the TV or monitor the console is plugged in to. For those with 1080p displays, the Xbox One X will supersample the 4K assets on the HD screen.
Furthermore, Gammill said that “it’s totally up to the title developer,” whether or not 4K assets are contained on a retail disc or simply distributed via a digital patch.
“Some games you’ll have the entirety of the content on the disc and only what’s needed is copied from the disc on to a hard drive,” he said. “Other games will have — and again it’s up to them — some assets that may be in the cloud; some assets may be on the disc.”
Gammill also confirmed that the Xbox team is ready for developers who choose to ship 4K assets across multiple discs, should the total game size be larger than a single Blu-ray disc.
“We now support multi-disc [games], so that’s definitely an option,” he said.
We’ll have more on the Intelligent Delivery System — specifically, involving Forza Motorsport 7 — next week.
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