Microsoft wants to put developers to work to help it reduce the carbon impact of its Xbox. The American company took advantage of the Game Developers Conference 2023, which is currently taking place in San Francisco, to unveil new “dedicated tools for measuring energy and carbon emissions designed for (and with) game creators”. The Redmond company will indeed offer developers several tools that allow them to measure in real time the energy consumption necessary for the proper execution of their games.
Real-time energy consumption monitoring
Reconciling reduced energy consumption and game performance is not an easy task. However, Microsoft explains that the search for the code responsible for over-consumption of energy in a game is not necessarily synonymous with cost or additional time in the development of a game. The firm also ensures that the energy optimizations made in the game code can be totally imperceptible by the players.
To help developers better understand the energy intensity required for their games, Microsoft will provide them with an Xbox Developer Sustainability Toolkit. With this toolkit, developers will be able to “identify and reduce power consumption in scenarios where a player does not need it, ensuring that the player experience is not negatively affected”.
In this toolkit, developers will have at their disposal a Game Development Kit (GDK) in which several measurement tools are integrated. They will be able to view information on the energy consumption of their game in real time, down to the millisecond. With this, they will be able to measure CPU usage and thereby identify energy inefficiencies that can be addressed.
Microsoft will also provide them with a certification report that they can use to identify the energy consumption averages of their game. The purpose of the operation is to allow them to see where their game is compared to the average in the game industry.
Developers will also have access to an energy consumption dashboard. This tool will allow them to have an overview of the global average of the amount of energy used by its games and to compare it with the global average of the platform. Finally, advice and a guide to good practices will be made available to them via the Xbox Game Dev Docs program set up by Microsoft.
Tools designed in collaboration with giants of the gaming industry
To create all these tools, Microsoft did not work alone. The Mountain View firm indicates that it has partnered with several studios, such as Ubisoft or 343 Industries. Thanks to Microsoft tools, the latter was also able to optimize his Halo games.
The studio has indeed realized that on the Xbox Series X operating in 4K / 60FPS, the graphics processor was used on average at 92%, which represents 67.5% of the console’s power consumption. By pushing its investigations a little, the studio realized that this consumption was identical when the game was paused. For what ? Simply because a 4K image that the player might not see was still displayed in the Settings menu. By reducing the definition of this image, they managed to reduce the energy consumption of their game by almost 15% when it was paused, without impacting the gaming experience of users. .
