According to industry experts, Microsoft's console BCPack will be a more efficient and capable solution than Cerny's Kraken on PlayStation 5.
We already know the final specifications of both Xbox Series X and PS5. Broadly speaking, it seems that there is no doubt that both systems will arrive perfectly prepared so that their hardware lasts the entire generation; with the first endowed with greater gross power and the second with a faster SSD memory. According to a former developer at Valve and Ensemble Studios, the Xbox texture compressor will be far superior.
What is that about BCPack and Kraken on Xbox Series X and PS5
The arrival of new generation consoles brings new technologies to the table and, with it, new names, technicalities and words with which the average video game user is not familiar. As Richard Geldreich explains in a complete thread via Twitter, the Kraken graphic compression system explained by Mark Cerny, PS5 architect, during the presentation of the console can become a standard due to its popularity and ease of use. facing the development sector.
Some back of the envelope figures:
– Kraken: Reduces the size of a complex non-RDO encoded BC7 format texture (say a normal map) by approx. 20-30%.
– BCPack: Approx. 50 +% size reduction. Depends on how far MS pushed the tech. Definitely more effective than just Kraken alone.– Richard Geldreich (@ richgel999) March 22, 2020
Efficiency will not be at odds with power, however. Geldreich's explanation turns precisely there, in that although Kraken offers more facilities – on paper – for the compression of textures with PS5, it will be less capable and ambitious for the long term, as Microsoft is doing with the BCPack, whose characteristics exact are unknown at the moment.
The so-called "Rate Distortion Optimization" (RDO) of Xbox Series X will, apparently, be able to compress with an added optimization the image on the screen. With exact figures, this developer aims for 50% texture compression on a map via the BCPack codec and the RDO option; while Kraken could compress that same volume of textures with between 20% and 30% on PS5. "Definitely more effective than Kraken on its own," he says, so supplementing the RDO can make a difference.
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
It should be said that James Stanard, graphic and architecture designer at Microsoft, has confirmed on Twitter that this BCPack is indeed a compression codec designed for these tasks.
If you want to know more about PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X face to face, in this article we compare the final technical characteristics of both. Also, in this report we review everything we know about the Microsoft console; while in this other we do the same with the fifth Sony home console. If all goes well, both of them will launch worldwide in Christmas 2020; although there are analyst voices that already place a delay due to the coronavirus.
