DX12 May Allow Xbox One To Save GPU Time, Render Ray Tracing, SuperFog And Custom Effects

The Xbox One hasn’t been having a good time as far as graphical prowess goes – several months after its release and it’s still faltering behind the PlayStation 4 in terms of high resolution textures, output resolution and frame rate. While we know that DirectX 12 will be heading to the console soon enough, there could be more to the API than just trying to help with the frame rate and resolution.

In fact, the API won’t have anything to do with increasing the resolution to whatever the standard is these days. However, what it can do is free up GPU resources through efficient hardware acceleration. So effects like ray tracing, superFog or whatever custom effects we may see down the line will be implemented and thus allow for an improved frame rate and resolution now that the GPU is free for those tasks.

It will also allow for better adoption on the PC, making the architecture even more similar and allowing developers to implement the same effects on the Xbox One without worrying about what to cut or add for the PC version and vice versa. But more than anything else, this indicates the Xbox One’s GPU is not as similar to the PS4’s initially revealed. Microsoft apparently has a deal with AMD but it means that the 7000 series Radeon isn’t what the Xbox One is packing.

Whatever be the case, Microsoft’s Xbox One obviously hasn’t revealed its full graphical potential by a long shot. While there may be problems now and limitations with the eSRAM, it’s easy to understand now why Microsoft isn’t all that worried. Another point to be noted that despite limitations due to eSRAM, it was designed in a manner to support tiled texture streaming in an extremely fast manner. The eSRAM was initially supposed to be using DX 11.2 but now with a newer version on the way it will be interesting to see whether developers will be willing to work around the bottlenecks and invest more time in it so that they can get the desired results.

What are your thoughts? Let us know below.

Reference: Reddit