Oxide Games Explains How Nitrous Engine Scales According to PS4/Xbox One GPU Differences

When the Xbox One and PS4 released, it wasn’t immediately obvious what the GPU differences were. Over time, it became more and more obvious when third party titles were capable of hitting 1080p resolution on the PS4 compared to the Xbox One. So how do things fare for developers when it comes to scaling their engine on the two?

We spoke to Oxide Games, creators of the Nitrous Engine, about the same. Considering the GPU differences, we asked how the team sales according to hardware? Do they simply target the lowest common denominator?

“We have this problem way more on consoles because we’re PC focused. PS4 and Xbox One are relatively in the same ballpark in performance. There are some differences. With PC space we have to 10x scale not like 30-40 percent type of thing. Our engine is built for integrated graphics. We’re going up to a Furry or a Titan. We have all sorts of knobs we can turn up and down. A lot of them are subtle. You may not notice a GPU that’s a little bit slower. Like 20-30 percent. I don’t know if you’d notice if one is that slower. The average person probably wouldn’t see that too much. We can hide that pretty well.

“It goes back into investing in different rendering technologies. The object space lighting stuff is very ALU efficient. Because of that we got a ride range of stuff there that we can do. It’s also resolution independent. If you’re computer ALU bound we can change how much of the scene is shaded at what rate. Where as, say you’re triangle bound we can change the TXAA settings to get different settings there.

“We have a lot of different knobs use to control that. Most traditional renderers are fixed. You’ve got ‘low,’ ‘medium,’ and ‘high.’ It’s very difficult for them to scale because resolution is going to cut into them. There are a lot of things that hamstring them. Where as we have a lot more freedom to embrace whatever the hardware strengths are.”

Thoughts on this? Let us know in the comments below.