After spending some quality time with the beta, we came away impressed with how well Path of Exile works on a console. Not only in terms of the look and feel of the combat, but how smooth it runs and comparable it is visually to the PC version. Making its debut today as free-to-play title on Xbox One, you should definitely check it out. Plus, our full interview with the developer Grinding Gear Games!

Working with the Xbox One hardware, where there any technical challenges getting the game up and running on console?

Jonathan: There were two big challenges for Xbox One. The first was that we had a DirectX 9 based engine. For Xbox, we had to move to DirectX 11. The second challenge was multithreading the engine. Consoles have much slower individual CPU cores, but they make up for it by having a lot more of them than a typical desktop PC. In the past, Path of Exile was basically a single-core game. Moving to Xbox meant multithreading the engine and that took some serious engineering effort.

The great thing is that both of those changes have had a massive improvement on performance for the PC game. We improved framerates by insane multiples like eight times or more in heavy combat.

Click Here to Read 'From PC to Console - Talking Path of Exile with Developer Grinding Gear Games'