A question on a lot of gamer’s minds, especially with the transition to new home console hardware, has been: “How much better can games look?” Fair or not, this community has come to expect leaps and bounds in graphical fidelity when a new generation of hardware is introduced. Microsoft, with the help of Nvidia and Square Enix, may have just shown a glimpse of what is looming for the future of gaming. In a keynote at Microsoft BUILD 2015, the mega-company rolled out a little project they have been working on with the aforementioned partners to  showcase DirectX 12’s capabilities.
The quick demo titled WITCH CHAPTER 0 [cry] uses Final Fantasy art, Nvidia GeoForce graphics, and of course the DirectX 12 application programming interface (API) to express human emotions in an extremely realistic manner. It features Angi, the same character we saw in a previous tech demo from Square Enix, crying in despair as though she had lost something dear to her. If portraying real human emotion is not impressive enough, 63 million polygons per scene sure is. To top it all off, everything shown off was in real time.
If you are interested in getting a glimpse of the future, feast your eyes on the video above which shows the full tech demo. As impressive as DirectX 12 is looking, this sort of implementation in video games won’t be seen for a good while, at least not on these consoles. What this tech-demo does do though, is answer the first question posed, “How much better can games look?”. Apparently the answer is: much, much better. This demo somewhat proves that the natural evolution in graphics will focus on being able to create characters that express human emotions in a realistic manner, thus creating a much stronger bond with the person holding the controller as a result.
Microsoft plans on adding DirectX 12 to the Xbox One but this level of intricacy probably won’t be seen in any of their games any time soon. But, at least it gives us a glimpse into what one day could be the norm. Direct your way down to the comments section below to let us know what you thought about this tech demo.
