We’ve seen snippets of Halo Infinite over the last couple of years, but the recent reveal of Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 was explicitly trailed as our first taste of what the next generation in console hardware will deliver from a visual perspective. However, confusion surrounds the nature of the content, which has been described as running in real-time and also as in-engine – two terms that are not exactly compatible with one another. Assuming this is much more than the standard CG trailer or the discredited notion of the ‘target render’, what does the reveal tell us about Microsoft’s vision for the next generation of console gaming? It looks great, but can the advances actually be quantified and qualified in any way?
The use of the phrase ‘in-engine’ is a catch-all term that can mean just about anything, but based on established precedents, it indicates that we’re looking at something closer to the real game than a CG teaser and in turn, it also suggests that we’re getting a first look at what Unreal Engine 4 may be capable of delivering on the next wave of consoles. And while we’re not exactly convinced it is running in real-time as such, there are imperfections in the presentation that seemingly rule out a pure CG asset.
For example, the depth of field effect in the trailer has standard problems we find in current-gen implementations of the effect, such as halos around certain objects. Similarly, tiny strands of Senua’s hair pop and fizzle around the depth of field – something that wouldn’t happen with super-sampling or a pure CG render. That said, these minor blemishes are literally all we could find in what is otherwise a nigh-on flawless presentation. Stacked up against Hellblade 1 on PC running maxed on an RTX 2080 Ti at native 4K, it’s a night and day improvement in terms of image quality.
Our gut feeling here is that the Hellblade asset is exactly what it says it is – in-engine and likely not real-time. After all, based on when Microsoft first received Xbox One X silicon (early in 2017, around 11 months before launch), the Series X processor was likely only finalised very recently and creating an asset of this quality and polish in such a compressed timescale seems unlikely.
But what if it were real-time? The raw specs of the trailer file itself are intriguing. If you look at the metadata of the video – it is mastered at just 24 frames per second and the actual resolution of the rendered frame between the cinematic black bars is 3840×1608: so a little more than 74 per cent of a ‘real’ 4K in spatial resolution and at 80 per cent of 30fps. All together, that is 60 per cent of the amount of pixels pushed per second compared to 4K30 – and something that’s decidedly easier to render than you may expect.