Microsoft released the bare-bones specs for the Xbox Series X a long time ago, but the bare-bones specs only tell half the story. Better hardware means better performance, but if those components don't work well together, you could end up with a system that feels less than the sum of its parts. In order to do so, Microsoft has introduced a system called the Velocity Architecture.

In a blog post on Xbox Wire, Jason Ronald, Director of Program Management for the Xbox Series X, explains how Velocity Architecture works. Essentially, the Velocity Architecture leverages four somewhat disparate technological advancements to ensure faster loading times for larger, more complex environments. These four components are: custom SSDs for the system, improved decompression, a customized application programming interface (API), and sampler feedback streaming (SFS), which allows for more efficient loading of textures

The new system is based on the following principles.

Ronald wrote his post with the general reader in mind, but it is still quite technical, so we will elaborate a bit more:

To get an overview of the features of the Velocity Architecture, the Xbox team has created a short video:

The Xbox Series X You've probably read about the customized SSDs in the Xbox One before: the Xbox One uses a standard hard disk drive, which is relatively slow compared to solid state drives. In addition to the standard SSD perks, the Xbox Series X storage delivers "consistent sustained performance" and handles input and output up to 40 times more efficiently than the Xbox One. Practically speaking, this means faster loading times and a system that manages heat more efficiently.

Hardware-accelerated decompression is a bit more difficult to explain. When a game loads assets, it must decompress the data. Such games would also take up an unprecedented amount of hardware space; the Xbox Series X will use a custom algorithm that makes input/output processing 100 times more efficient than the Xbox One.

Next up is the new DirectStorage API, which will work with both SSDs and the latest version of DirectX to prioritize I/O processing more efficiently. A deeper dive into this subject would take too long to describe here, but one specific benefit of this technology is a faster fast-travel system in open-world games.

Finally, there is Sampler Feedback Streaming for handling textures. If you have played the same game on both console and PC, you know how different textures can look depending on processing power. Sampler Feedback Streaming means smoother transitions and fewer pop-ins, even when the textures are farther away from the player, as more resources can be redirected to loading the textures and the player moves closer to the object.

These features sound a bit similar to what Sony described for the PS5 in its March "Road to PS5" presentation. However, given that the Xbox Series X has slightly more powerful specs (including 12 teraflops of graphics power compared to the PS5's 10.3 teraflops), it will be interesting to see how the two compare in actual use.

We will have to wait and see what these innovations mean for each game. Reduced load times seem to be the most immediate benefit, but as developers become more familiar with the Xbox Series X architecture, we may also see improvements in level design and immersion.