14 DAY TRIAL // Boyd Multere, Xbox's director of development, has assured everyone that the Xbox One is just starting up, and as developers wrap their head around its architecture, they will achieve native 1080p resolutions.
He says that "the graphics processing units are really complicated beasts this time around," during an interview in the latest issue of OXM UK.
Improvements that result from the optimization of software to run on specific hardware platforms are not something new, as both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 went through a similar cycle after their launch, with developers being able to draw far more power from both hardware platforms now than they used to be able at launch.
The two console giants will also improve on their operating systems over time, and over the course of the Xbox One's life, more and more developers will be able to achieve 1080p visuals on the console, the matter being simply one of tweaking performance to suit the particularities of the underlying hardware, especially the GPU and ESRAM.
The Xbox One and Xbox 360 are two completely different platforms using an entirely different processing architecture, which means that developers used to the 360 cannot simply utilize their knowledge and apply it to the Xbox One, they have to learn from scratch how to make products specifically tailored for the new platform.
"The hardware is basically baked, and what comes next is people discovering better software techniques to take advantage of it, especially in the ordering of the data so it flows through all the caches correctly, and I think there's a lot of opportunity there," Multerer affirmed in confidence.
He has further pointed out that tuning data sets becomes extra important when the Xbox One's ESRAM is utilized, as it works in tandem with the console's 8GB of DDR3 RAM.
So far, the game making studios that developed games for the Xbox One didn't have the opportunity to toy with the hardware and fine-tune their creations, but once the engine developers manage to learn how the particular architecture and especially the GPU works, then the world will start seeing titles that will be able to better and better take advantage of it and both higher resolutions and improved performance will be achieved.
Another point of view is the quality of pixels versus the quantity of pictures, and Multerer concluded by saying that we can look forward to "fairly large improvements in GPU outputs as people really tune these data sets now to get maximum use out of their GPUs."