14 DAY TRIAL // Turn 10 Studios head Dan Greenawalt believes that the best way to improve the performance of Xbox One games is for each and every developer to optimize their own code.
There has been a lot of debate regarding the difference in raw power between Microsoft's Xbox One and Sony's PlayStation 4, as well as on the elements that might increase the potential of the former to catch up to the latter.
Turn 10 Studios is the video game developer behind Forza Motorsport, one of the principal franchises that are exclusive to Xbox platforms, and he believes that, although the 10 percent GPU gain after Microsoft dropped the Kinect as well as the prospective improvements that DirectX 12 will bring are welcome additions, the true gains in performance lie elsewhere.
Greenewalt told DualShockers that the best thing about the Xbox One platform was that it was a constantly evolving one, and as the OS got smaller and better at doing its job, we would see numerous optimizations on the core console hardware, and games would get better, just like it happened with the Xbox 360 computer entertainment system, over the course of the last eight years.
While any amount of additional juice helps, the boss of Turn 10 Studios believes that the bulk of the gains when it comes to the performance of any game comes from internal optimization of the actual code, which the studio focuses on.
Furthermore, being a first-party developer, Turn 10 has somewhat of a privileged status, but they are not shy to share their findings with others, even third-party developers, and these kinds of discussions lead to games running better and faster, which in turn ends up helping everyone, including the end user.
Greenawalt even went as far as to say that internal code optimization was where the biggest performance benefits were seen while developing Forza Horizon 2.
Hard to argue with the man, especially since there have been many discussions regarding the performance of various video games being due to poor optimization and engine decisions, such as Ubisoft's open-world hacking adventure game Watch Dogs, which was criticized by many gamers for the inefficient way in which it managed the graphics card frame buffer.
Forza Horizon 2 is currently slated for a September 30 release, coming to the Xbox 360 and Xbox One platforms. The open-world racing game is set in Southern Europe and, for the first time in the series, it will feature a dynamic weather system that influences driving conditions.