Your visualisations are going places: SciVis on gaming consoles

Gaming consoles, whether stationary or handheld, are designed to provide a reasonably high level of computing power to run contemporary video games at an attractive price point, a compact form factor and modest energy consumption. While consoles have traditionally been closed-off systems, recent versions of the Xbox allow the development of apps for the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) on retail devices, making it potentially a suitable platform for bringing scientific visualisation (SciVis) applications to the masses. We describe how to run such applications, namely volume rendering and ray casting of spherical glyphs, on commodity gaming systems, not only on the Xbox Series X/S, but also on handheld devices like the Steam Deck. We detail the challenges and limitations we encountered during the implementation and provide the results of an extensive study of rendering performance, not only proving the viability of the approach but also allowing for a cost and benefit evaluation compared to standard desktop computers.