Xbox Series X: Unity tech demo under DirectX 12 in 4K and Ray Tracing | Xbox One

The Unity engine recently held the Unite 2022 conference during which several interventions were made to promote this engine that is used today in many video games. And it was a tech demo on Xbox Series X that was introduced.

From the fixed demo to its use in video games

Remember, that was March 2022. The unit unveiled Enemy tech show that aims to pretend “The power and capabilities of the Unity platform to create unique and visually appealing content”. DLSS, Ray Tracing, and Screen Space Global Illumination were on the show to deliver a scene that was apparently resource-intensive. However, this same scene works well on Xbox Series X thanks to a few tricks.

Silvia Rasheva, Producer at Unity, details the engine’s progress in terms of facial animation, and in particular to make it more lifelike. When broadcasting a demo like enemies, the animation is fixed and freezes in time.

But in a video game, developers need to “play” with the feelings of the characters and need more flexibility. And here comes Ziva, a company that specializes in special effects, especially for cinema. Thus Sylvia Rasheva makes the presentation enemies, but her heavy 4D data used for the actress’s face has been replaced by a Ziva doll of only 50MB in size.

The idea here is to give animators more flexibility in video games. According to her, this set of tools provides a level of quality and interactivity that is impossible to achieve today using the methods of facial animation in today’s games.

The demo runs in 4K on Xbox Series X.

One would think that a high-end computer would be necessary to run the demo, but Unity Teams is now showing us that it works just fine in 4K on Xbox Series X. Even better, the pretender is able to interact in real time with the character by adding wind to give movement for hair or by modifying his facial expressions using Ziva Tools.

The second part of the demo also shows us how to manage the reflections on the table on which the chessboard is placed. This is actually real-time ray tracing made with DirectX 12.

Of course, all this remains a technical show and as usual, we must remember that it seems difficult to get such a display with this level of realism in a game that requires a larger environment, artificial intelligence for setting and everything other components of a real-time video game. However, seeing that the Xbox Series X is capable of playing such complex scenes remains intriguing.