Sony unveiled their next-gen console – PlayStation 5’s specs in the deep dive architecture last week. While Mark Cerny talked mostly about PS5’s custom SSD and the audio, he also mentioned a new texture compression technology that PS5 is using called – Kraken. Well, it looks like Microsoft also has a new texture compression tech – BCPack, for Xbox Series X, that’s reportedly better than the PS5’s Kraken.
According to the industry professional, Richard Geldreich, who worked for Valve and Ensemble Studios, Microsoft’s ‘Dark Horse’ a.k.a BCPack for Xbox Series X could even be more powerful than PS5’s Kraken. He put out a series of tweets explaining how the texture compression works on consoles.
Also Read: ‘Project Acoustic’ Audio Ray Tracing For Xbox Series X Revealed
It's a new compression codec specifically designed for game textures. They are almost always "block compressed" (BC) to begin with. We compress these textures even further, but for obvious reasons, we didn't want to call it "BCCompress". 😄
— James Stanard (@JamesStanard) March 20, 2020
Geldreich then asked James Stanard, who works as Graphics Optimization R&D and Engine Architect at Microsoft, about when we can expect more details on Xbox Series X’s BCPack.
Apart from that, we recently got reports from several devs suggesting that Xbox Series X’s power performance is ‘quite staggering’ if compared to PlayStation 5’s power performance. But that doesn’t mean poor graphics and FPS are. Keep in mind that it’s the games that matter the most. What are your thoughts on this? Let us know in the comments!
PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X will be out holiday of 2020.
