Today, Microsoft is said to be revealing the long-rumored Xbox Series X gameplay of Forza Motorsport 8 running at 4K and 120fps. They may also unveil some pretty impressive surprises, such as one of the Xbox Series X's key features: cloud-powered Server Side Rendering combined with local DXR graphics.

The presentation will take place at AMD Financial Day today (March 5) from 1pm to 6pm PT in Santa Clara, CA. At least according to this Reddit post. I don't know how reliable this post is, but it seems right to me. What this post says may indicate that he is posting notes from a recent keynote rehearsal.

This report claims that Microsoft will be attending AMD Financial Day to "showcase the ray tracing solution we built with AMD for native DXR hardware support." It further claims that it is up to 50% more efficient than the Nvidia RTX implementation for DXR, Microsoft's own graphics library.

The Redditor continues with a statement that seems to be taken from the official press release, giving a step-by-step description of the demonstration we are about to see.

First, it explains that RDNA2 was developed exclusively for Microsoft and high-power Radeon GPUs. This architecture includes "deep learning AI for upscaling, animation interpolation (adding 60 fps support to 30 fps games), and intelligence for a very wide variety of NPCs (non-playable players)." The redditor claims.

And Microsoft is demonstrating just how good this is with a lot of eye candy developed by Redmond-based Turn 10 Studios, the developer of "Forza Motorsport." The post goes on to say that Turn 10 has been "working exclusively on this technology for a year and a half."

According to the Redditor, Turn 10 and Microsoft will be showing off a demo of a racing game (presumably "Forza Motorsport 8") that apparently happens on rainy days. The demo will include "ray-traced reflections everywhere, using a combination of ray-traced light probes in the low-frequency portion of the image for global illumination and actual near-field (frustrum) ray tracing."

The demo uses server-side rendering [SSR] and adds ray tracing on top of it to remove SSR artifacts. The demo "pans the camera slowly over the Nürburgring and switches between SSR (done in Microsoft's Azure cloud) and DXR (done locally on the Xbox Series X) to show the multi-color development mode, which part is rendering what and how You don't notice it until you get to it."

That sounds very impressive to me and sets it apart from Google and Nvidia's cloud gaming platforms. We'll have to wait and see how it actually looks (if the rumors are true).

The demo show will reportedly continue with "Forza Horizon 4," VRS is a technology that allows GPUs to improve the detail and quality of complex parts of an image while lowering the power consumption of simple parts.

The reasoning behind VRS is that our eyes and brains cannot focus on the entire image. When focusing on a screen, the eye concentrates on one place of action, which is usually the more complex part of the image. The graphics engine does not have to spend as much power on the less complex peripheral parts of the image. As a result, power is optimized, detail is further enhanced, frame rates are improved, etc.

As a result, Playground Games, developer of the Forza Horizon series, added VRS to Forza Horizon 4 when it received the Xbox Series X development kit in December. The result: a whopping 32% increase in the game's frame rate with "no optimization, just using VRS in certain areas of motion blur". "According to the redditor, "VRS will change the way they design games (VRS as an alternative to motion blur)," noting that "lead engineers are reaching 4K/120 today with XSX thanks to the RDNA2 architecture and the joint efforts of AMD and Microsoft

Yes, that's right.

Yes, 120 frames per second at 4K.

Another feature of Microsoft and AMD's joint demonstration is "what's next for the industry. The poster will "delve deep into xCloud" and will showcase "special cloud capabilities (built into the Xbox Series X and supported by RDNA2 GPUs)."

Azure ray tracing with RDNA2 chips will also be introduced, which is said to provide full-scene ray tracing to online devices connected to Azure. with RDNA2.

The Playground folks will reportedly jump on stage again for another demo, with the Playground demo person saying, "This is something our second team has been working on for the past two years," and moving on to "a live demo with real-time connections to Azure." We are told. Here's a description of what we'll be seeing:

It all sounds pretty impressive to me. The anonymous Redditor concludes his post by saying that you can see everything today, so don't hate.

Can't wait to see all these wonders.