The base Xbox One’s hardware has always been an issue for developers working with the system- and this was best exemplified by Microsoft’s decision to go with the ESRAM on it, which ended up acting as an unnecessary bottleneck for a lot of developers.
The Xbox One X eschews this entirely, of course, and in any case, we are far enough into the generation that hopefully specters of the ESRAM are a thing of the past- but we did ask Chris Wilson of Grinding Gear Games, working on Path of Exile for the Xbox One, what they thought of the ESRAM based on their work with the system.
“Our use of the eSRAM is very simple, so we didn’t really run into issues. We put our shadow maps and a few other surfaces into eSRAM and it sped up rendering those things,” he said, noting that there had been no issues with even the base version of the system, and that they were expecting the game to hit 1080p and 60fps even on the base Xbox One.
We also asked him if there were any plans on releasing the game on the PS4, and why they had chosen to go with the Xbox One instead of the PS4, in spite of the latter’s install base.
“We haven’t made any plans at the moment,” he said. “Our decision to launch on the Xbox One was because we have a great relationship with Microsoft and their platform is Windows-based, making the conversion straightforward. The benefits of adding DirectX 11 support to Path of Exile (to facilitate and Xbox One launch) were immediately applicable to the existing Windows PC version of Path of Exile. If we had chosen a different platform, then we wouldn’t have been able to improve the PC version in the same way for free.”
Which is fair, and I guess it is also a vindication of Microsoft’s Xbox One-Windows 10 strategy. If more developers begin to approach game development this way, then Microsoft may be able to wrest their way back somewhat from where they are at the moment.