14 DAY TRIAL // The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt's Lead Engine Programmer doesn't believe that DirectX 12 will solve the Xbox One's 1080p problem, in spite of the fact that it comes with proper multi-thread support and reduces CPU overhead by a significant margin.
The Xbox One console has had a pretty rough time since its launch in November last year, being outsold by the PlayStation 4, the system's main competitor from Sony, time and time again.
In addition to this, many reports have the PlayStation 4 as the beefier of the two machines, and the Xbox One was shown repeatedly to struggle achieving 1080p resolution or maintaining a steady 60 frames per second rate.
Many big and small games failed to hit the golden 1920x1080 resolution or consistently hold the framerate that is expected from next-gen titles, and there have been many rumors (and much more hopes) that the upcoming update to the Xbox One's API, DirectX 12, could see more games hitting the desired specs.
However, at least one prominent next-gen developer doesn't buy into that. CD Projekt Red's Balasz Torok, currently hard at work on the third installment in The Witcher series, scheduled to release next year on next-gen platforms, has revealed what his thoughts are on whether or not the updated software tools will aid the struggling Xbox One.
"I think there is a lot of confusion around what and why DX12 will improve. Most games out there can't go 1080p because the additional load on the shading units would be too much. For all these games DX12 is not going to change anything," he has told GamingBolt.
"They might be able to push more triangles to the GPU but they are not going to be able to shade them, which defeats the purpose. To answer the first question, I think we will see a change in the way graphics programmers will think about their pipelines and this will result in much better systems hopefully," Torok continues.
This is one of the reasons people are generally stating that the PlayStation 4 is a lot more powerful than the Xbox One, because its GPU has more shader processing units, allowing the system to output more content per frame, thus resulting in the proven ease of reaching 1080p resolution.
Furthermore, when a game manages to reach 1080p on the Xbox One, this is often done at a sacrifice to some other area, to something else that is being rendered on the screen, because of the Xbox One's GPU's lower ceiling, especially when you also take into account the convoluted eSRAM setup.
The Xbox One will be able to push more triangles when DirectX 12 hits, but it most likely won't be able to do anything more than that with them, which will improve the overall geometry of anything rendered on it but won't improve the color and shadow rendering.
The general consensus on DirectX 12 is that it will indeed help Xbox One games, just not as much as everyone is hoping. In any case, we'll find out when the toolkit finally becomes available. Until then, developers still have to wrap their heads around the particularities of the console, so improvement is also expected on that front.
