14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has talked a bit about the design of the Xbox One hardware, saying that it's modeled after super-computers and that it focuses on smooth framerates rather than high resolutions, although improvements will appear with future games.
The Xbox One and PS4 came out at the same time last year but it became clear quite rapidly that the PS4 has an advantage in terms of hardware power as well as in terms of video game performance, as multi-platform titles often ran at higher resolutions or framerates on the PS4 than on the Xbox One.
However, Microsoft has made it clear that things will change over time and the company's Director of Development, Boyd Multerer, has shed some more technical insight on the Xbox One's emphasis on framerate rather than resolution, while calling the console's hardware a super-computer design.
"This is a design out of the super-computer realm. So I expect that we're going to continue to see fairly large improvements in GPU output as people really tune these data sets," he told TotalXbox.
"Part of it is the obvious one where everyone's still getting to know this hardware and they'll learn to optimize it. Part of it is less obvious, in that we focused a lot of our energy on framerate. And I think we have a consistently better framerate story that we can tell," the developer said about the problem with resolutions.
According to the executive, the CPU is really focused on delivering a smooth framerate while the GPU needs extra work so that a game uses all of its available bandwidth.
"On the CPU side, we really pushed how fast the central processor is running, so you'll see much smoother framerates, you'll see much less hitching on the Xbox One, and that's a big deal in these games: you really want them to be smooth.
"The GPUs are really complicated beasts this time around. In the Xbox 360 era, getting the most performance out of the GPU was all about ordering the instructions coming into your shader. In this era, that's important - but it's not nearly as important as getting all your data structures right so that you're getting maximum bandwidth usage across all the different buffers."
As of right now, however, the Xbox One is still lagging behind the PS4 and it's going to be interesting to see how the major upcoming games of the year will perform on the two platforms, considering developers have had almost a year to tweak their games for the new devices.