The Surge Dev: Xbox One Resolution Will Be As High As Possible, Talks About eSRAM Issues And SDK Updates

The Xbox One Scorpio may be launching next year as a sort of catch all solution to all of the problems the Xbox One has that are rooted in its weaker than expected hardware- but for now, we are stuck with the hardware that we have, and the hardware that we have is rather weak.

Speaking to Deck 13 Interactive’s CEO Jan Klose, who previously worked on the cult hit Lords of the Fallen, and who are currently working on The Surge, we decided to speak a bit about the development challenges that the current Xbox One hardware poses. Apparently, at this point, whatever they are certainly don’t seem to be insurmountable.

“We try to get [our resolution] as high as possible, and were using the same engine that we were using for Lords of the Fallen,” Klose said, speaking in response to a question about The Surge‘s resolution on the Xbox One. “So we have a lot of time to approve it, to optimize it. So hopefully we get a really, really good performance. Whether we can hit 1080p we cannot say yet because this will be more in the polishing state of the game.”

He also spoke about the Xbox One’s eSRAM, and the notion that it is the primary bottleneck that a lot of developers have- including when trying to run games at 1080p. “I think it really depends on the way you put the assets in your game. More than really the fine-tuning on the tech side. So if you need a lot of frames, yeah, you need to be pretty tricky. We hope we are,” he said.

Speaking of the new SDK update for the Xbox One and PS4, that apparently allows developers to utilize their resources more efficiently, Klose said that for The Surge, Deck 13 are looking at stabilizing the frame rate.

“I think we try to have a very high frame rate because this game is so much about timing, so this is our first and foremost focus. But on the other hand we also really want to have really cool visuals.. We have our own particle system and there we can really benefit from all the processing power we get. We are a bit scalable.”

As someone who really would take a higher frame rate over a higher resolution any given day, I do appreciate the same focus from Deck 13. It is also interesting to note that at this point, the primary bottleneck that the eSRAM imposes is one on frame rate- not resolution.