Bethesda unveils Orion to offer engine-level enhancements for streaming games

Bethesda and id Software have announced Orion, an engine and platform agnostic collection of software technologies aimed at boosting the performance of games played through a streaming service.

The tech was revealed during Bethesda’s E3 press conference today, and the company says that integrating a game with the Orion SDK allows games to perform “faster and more fluid” when played through game streaming services like Google Stadia, Project xCloud, and others.

Specifically, Bethesda says that incorporating Orion at the game engine level opens streamed games up to 20 percent faster FPS, lower latency, and 40 percent lower bandwidth usage. As demonstrated during the presentation, Bethesda’s own Doom (2016) integrated with Orion can be played at 60 fps off a mobile device.

No news yet on how developers can get their hands on the technology for their own projects, but Bethesda is running a tech test on the player side of things for select members of its Doom Slayers Club fansite later this year.