The Xbox One X promises to be a hugely exciting machine, at the very least on the basis of its hardware, which is sophisticated and advanced beyond any other console on the market. When the Xbox One X finally launches later this year, it will be the most powerful console ever made.
One of the many ways in which the console is a step up over other consoles, and even some mid range PC builds, is the memory pool- the Xbox One X has a total of 12GB of GDDR5 RAM, of which 9GB is available to developers. What are the advantages to this?
Speaking to GamingBolt, Tom Wimbush, Lead Designer of Fable Fortune, noted that there are multiple advantages to how the memory is laid out on an Xbox One X. “Unlike in a desktop PC the Xbox One and Xbox One X enjoy a shared memory architecture,” he said. “This means the memory can be divided between the CPU and GPU as the developers need. When bringing the title to Ultra HD resolutions [on Xbox One X] we’ll need the increased memory on the GPU in order to make room for higher resolution textures for crystal clear images.”
We also asked him if he foresees a longer life for the Xbox One X- it seems to be powerful enough, after all, that it is future proofed well enough. According to Wimbush, the Xbox One X should likely be the last update to the Xbox One – anything beyond this will officially be ‘next generation.’
“It’s always hard to predict the console market. The Xbox One X is certainly a serious piece of hardware. If I had to guess, I would say that this will be the last ‘update’ that we’ll see to the current generation of consoles as efforts shift towards planning for the next generation, but I could be wrong!”
All of which sounds sensible enough- though it also does raise the question, will there be a next generation for Xbox? Microsoft has indicated an interest in keeping the iterative consoles model going for the foreseeable future. It will be interesting to see how things unfold/