Games By Matthew Humphries Feb. 11, 2014 11:29 am
One area where the PS4 has a clear advantage over the Xbox One is in the resolution of the games being shipped. Typically you’ll see the same game on Xbox One running at 720p achieving 1080p on Sony’s hardware. But it’s too early to say for sure if this is down to the hardware simply being better inside the PS4, or a matter of the software just not being as mature.
Now Rebellion Games and Sniper Elite 3 senior producer Jean-Baptiste Bolcato has shed some light on what’s going on, and it’s good news for Xbox One owners.
While it’s true that the PS4 currently performs better than the Xbox One, according to Bolcato this isn’t down to a big performance difference between the hardware. It’s to do with Microsoft’s inclusion of 32MB of eSRAM. It’s very fast, but also very small, meaning it has been impossible to use it for 1080p resolution games because it is just too small. To do so you’d have to split a game up into chunks, which according to Bolcato, makes it “a pain in the ass.”
That may sound ominous because Microsoft can’t upgrade the amount of eSRAM in your console, but Bolcato is optimistic. He says Microsoft has managed to tweak the SDK for its console to unlock 1080p. They’ve worked with and around the eSRAM limitation and made it easier for developers to take advantage of the true performance locked away in the machine. He claims that once the SDK is available, new games will appear that are “comfortably running at 1080p.”
So, just like when the PS3 launched and it took a while to extract the true performance from its complex hardware, this time it’s Microsoft’s console that’s going to take a while to fully understand. How soon that happens, and how quickly we get 1080p games as standard on the Xbox One, all depends on when Microsoft releases this SDK and what further improvements the Xbox team has planned.
One final key point Bolcato makes is that there is a big difference between the two consoles. Sony has produced a console focused on gaming, where as Microsoft has delivered something that is as much a multimedia box as a games machine. Because of that the PS4 is going to be easier to work with and faster for games, but Bolcato is hopeful the Xbox One will be able to catch up eventually.
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Now Rebellion Games and Sniper Elite 3 senior producer Jean-Baptiste Bolcato has shed some light on what’s going on, and it’s good news for Xbox One owners.
While it’s true that the PS4 currently performs better than the Xbox One, according to Bolcato this isn’t down to a big performance difference between the hardware. It’s to do with Microsoft’s inclusion of 32MB of eSRAM. It’s very fast, but also very small, meaning it has been impossible to use it for 1080p resolution games because it is just too small. To do so you’d have to split a game up into chunks, which according to Bolcato, makes it “a pain in the ass.”
That may sound ominous because Microsoft can’t upgrade the amount of eSRAM in your console, but Bolcato is optimistic. He says Microsoft has managed to tweak the SDK for its console to unlock 1080p. They’ve worked with and around the eSRAM limitation and made it easier for developers to take advantage of the true performance locked away in the machine. He claims that once the SDK is available, new games will appear that are “comfortably running at 1080p.”
So, just like when the PS3 launched and it took a while to extract the true performance from its complex hardware, this time it’s Microsoft’s console that’s going to take a while to fully understand. How soon that happens, and how quickly we get 1080p games as standard on the Xbox One, all depends on when Microsoft releases this SDK and what further improvements the Xbox team has planned.
One final key point Bolcato makes is that there is a big difference between the two consoles. Sony has produced a console focused on gaming, where as Microsoft has delivered something that is as much a multimedia box as a games machine. Because of that the PS4 is going to be easier to work with and faster for games, but Bolcato is hopeful the Xbox One will be able to catch up eventually.
More...
