Despite talk of upgraded Xbox One consoles, the console’s eSRAM still remains a point of contention for many developers. It’s becoming a lot more manageable recently as a Wicked Witch Software executive told GamingBolt. We asked the Rugby Challenge 3 developer about eSRAM and the challenges it posed for other studios (with some using it more wisely for texture streaming). Did the development team face any issue with eSRAM when working on the Xbox One?

“Yes, there were challenges on both next generation platforms, preserving the gameplay and increasing the resolution and texture densities. The eSRAM issue was handled fairly easily by the development team as one of the many challenges.”

Is the studio using the latest SDK for more CPU power and does it impact the game’s performance? “We are using a recent SDK that allows us to use the core that was previously dedicated to the Kinect. This has been helpful in getting some better performance for the Xbox One and allowing us to run at 1080p. This is the first installment of RC3 on Xbox One/PS4 and we are confident we can build on this and improve features and performance overtime.”

Rugby Challenge 3 launches this year for the PS4, Xbox One, PS3, PS4 and PC later this year.

Ever since the launch of Xbox One, the eSRAM has been the major culprit behind lower resolution of certain games on the Xbox One. However the development situation seems to be improving with major AAA games like Destiny and Call of Duty Advanced Warfare running at 1080p, although the latter runs at a dynamic resolution.

Digital Extremes’ Warframe was one of the first game to achieve parity in resolution for the PS4 and Xbox One versions. So how did the developers utilized Xbox One’s eSRAM in this case and whether it was really a pain to work with? GamingBolt got in touch with the game’s Sr. Programmer, Ron Janzen to know more.

“The eSRAM was quite easy to work with. The issue is the limited size of the ESRAM (32MB) and deciding what should go in there. Currently we are using it for high-traffic render targets which pretty much fills it up,” Ron Janzen said.

“There are some scenarios where the ESRAM is used in a more dynamic manner which will be complicated by efficiently transferring data in and out of ESRAM as well as the associated synchronization issues which we do to gain better performance but in general it’s pretty straightforward.”

As with every console cycles, developers will come across major hurdles but with optimizations and better tool set, those obstacles can be overcome. Microsoft must be applauded for the work they have done since the console’s launch. The Redmond based company has released the popular June SDK update that have made life easier for developers and have added hundreds of new features to the console since launch.

On a related note, we reviewed the PS4 version of Warframe last year and found it to be a pretty solid first person shooter.

GamingBolt had a chance to speak to Audiokinetic senior sales representative Mike Drummelsmith, whose company has worked on the video game audio development middleware Wwise, used in numerous popular titles. This time, we asked Drummelsmith about the Xbox One’s eSRAM and it’s impact on the development of Wwise tools.

Though the PS4 and Xbox One are very similar in their architecture – both featuring custom AMD CPUs and GPUs – they are distinct in that the former uses 8 GB GDDR5 unified RAM and the latter uses eSRAM. Some developers have pointed out issues with the eSRAM and it’s even been called out for resulting in a lower resolution for some games. What was Drummelsmith’s take on its effects for Wwise?

“As with any new hardware, there are always funky complexities and quirks to work around. Luckily in this particular situation, it hasn’t affected us. As I mentioned above, having the extra audio processor on the Xbox One has had both benefits and detriments for us, but we’ve worked through them.

“Last generation, the situation was reversed, and we had to work hard through the complexity of the PS3. Comparatively, this generation has been much easier to work with. From our perspective on the audio side, the two systems are pretty much the same, though we get the secondary output on PS4 (playing sounds through the controller, like in Resogun), which is a pretty neat feature.”

Thoughts or disagreements? Let us know in the comments.

Playground Games’ Forza Horizon 2 has been a fairly strong success since coming out but there’s been plenty of praise for the game’s 1080p resolution and 4X MSAA. You’d think such a feat would be hard to pull off given the Xbox One’s hardware, with the eSRAM often cited as a limiting factor. Speaking to Eurogamer, lead rendering engineer Andy Sage revealed how the eSRAM actually helped in development.

“We scheduled specific optimisation phases during the project development, where we looked at improvements that would allow us to achieve the solid 30fps that we were aiming for. We analysed eSRAM usage during each of these phases and determined what gains could be made, in particular optimising which render targets were in eSRAM throughout the frame.

“This involved careful analysis of which targets were required at which point in the frame to allow us to maximise the amount of eSRAM resident resources at any one time. It was also necessary to have a good understanding of what the bottlenecks were for each rendering stage so we could target eSRAM optimisations for systems that benefited from the additional bandwidth. eSRAM is pretty easy to manage, mainly because you don’t need to resolve textures to read them and you can make textures partially resident.”

What are your thoughts on the same? Are you enjoying Forza Horizon 2 thus far? Let us know in the comments.

Crytek was one of the first and most prominent evangelists of the Xbox One in the game development community- the developer, noted for its graphically intensive games, threw its weight behind the Xbox One with the action launch title, Ryse: Son of Rome, which, for all its other faults, did at least look stunning.

However, Crytek is considerably more critical of the Xbox One and its hardware now than it was before. The console, it seems, presented the development team with significant difficulties. As far as Crytek is concerned, both the Xbox One and the PS4 were dated the moment they came out.

“Console hardware was considerably less powerful than high-end PCs at launch,” they said, further explaining that a lot of Ryse’s many visual limitations- such as its resolution of 900p, and its lack of MSAA with deferred lighting- were because of the Xbox One’s limited hardware, and in particular, its ESRAM, which created issues for the team.

Oh well… that’s nice to know, I guess.

Mel Kirk, the Vice President of Publishing over at Zen Studios, the folks that brought you Pinball FX 2 on the Xbox One recently mentioned that the Xbox One’s eSRAM caused no issues when they were developing their game. Since the developer has already worked on PS4, PC and Xbox One, we asked about his thoughts on the Xbox One’s API and whether it holds itself well against the ones present on PC and PS4.

Mel was not able to reveal anything about the API but he stated that working on the Xbox One has no issues. “Due to confidentiality restrictions, I am not able to answer this question in detail, but I will say that working with Xbox One is easy for an experienced dev team, there are no challenges out of the ordinary, and the code is solid,” he said to GamingBolt.

And whether the team faced any issues due to the Xbox One’s eSRAM? “No, we haven’t had any issues. Pinball FX2 is a big game with a lot of DLC content, and we have seen no issues.”

Despite Kirk’s team not running into any problems, many other developers have called out Microsoft on the issue, Stardock CEO Brad Wardell even went so far as to say they cheaped out on the ram.

Ever since the Xbox One was introduced and its internal hardware revealed, speculation had been running wild that the console’s eSRAM is holding it back. When you consider that the PS4 opted for unified DDR5 RAM versus the Xbox One’s DDR3 RAM and eSRAM, it’s not hard to see which console is more powerful. But have developers really been facing problems with creating games on the Xbox One?

There seemed no better person to ask than Fable Legends executive producer Geoff Smith of Lionhead Studios. On whether the development team faced any problems, Smith said, “A little, to be honest not too bad. We’ve had a fairly straight-forward Xbox One development; it’s a good platform to develop for.”

GamingBolt also asked how Fable Legends had been in development for. “We’ve been in development for a couple of years. Coming up to a couple of years in September, I should be honest. We passed our concept review in September 2012. We’re just going into full production now.”

Fable Legends is exclusive to the Xbox One and currently has no release date. The beta is due out this year though so stay tuned for more details.

It’s been a long ride since the launch of the Xbox One, though it hasn’t even been a year since the console launched. Compulsion Games, which developed Contrast for the PS4 and PC before eventually bringing the shadow-play puzzle platformer to the Xbox One, recently held an AMA to talk about how the tool kit has developed as compared to when they first received it.

In response to the same, Compulsion stated on Reddit, “Hmm, I don’t have a great deal of info for you. We only updated once since starting developing on it in January/February, and then we were done three months later. However, the tools are always more mature after (compared to before) launch, and there were in reasonably good shape.

“Generally we stick to one version of an SDK, unless we need to upgrade (whether that need is tech driven, ie the new SDK supports a feature we want to use, or because that SDK isn’t release supported any more).”

Compulsion’s Contrast was also one of the first few big-name indie games to be available for PlayStation Plus subscribers shortly after its official release. What led to the inclusion in PS+ and how would it – along with Games With Gold – affect the developer? Compulsion answers, “We got asked. We have a pretty good relationship with Sony, and when it looked like we were going to make the launch date, we started talking about it. We had hoped that the marketing support would mean we’d reach way more people.

“The PS+ and GwG programs are great for visibility. There is a substantial number of people who would never have known who we are, except for PS+. It’ll be really interesting to see how GwG grows over the next year, I think.”

It was also interesting to hear about Compulsion’s use of the Xbox One’s eSRAM. This has been under scrutiny since before the console’s release. While it has been praised for its texture streaming capabilities, it’s also been criticized for being hard to develop for (in comparison to the PS4’s unified architecture) and underpowered. What is Compulsion doing with it? They first state that, “Yes we did use the Xbox One’s ESRAM. We didn’t spend a huge amount of time tuning it; but we use it to store our most sensitive/commonly used visual elements.”

Compulsion further added that, “It’ll be interesting to see how people use it – we didn’t need to take too much advantage of it.”

Contrast is currently available for the Xbox One. Have you had a chance to play it? Let us know what you think in the comments, along with Compulsion’s use of eSRAM? Let us know in the comments.

Silicon Studio recently revealed that its post-processing effects engine Yebis 2 had been used for Square Enix’s tech demo for Agni’s Philosophy and for the E3 2013 trailer for Final Fantasy 15.

For those who are unaware, Yebis 2 is a post processing effects middleware developed by Japan based Silicon Studios. The technology has been used in several games like MotoGP 14, Fighter Withing and many more. GamingBolt got in touch with the lead architect of Yebis 2, Masaki Kawase (whose answers were transcribed by GM and R&D engineer Colin Magne) about the potential of Yebis 2 and how it would scale for the PS4 and Xbox One. How does it use the Xbox One’s eSRAM’s high bandwidth of 204 GB/s and the PS4’s unified memory architecture?

“We started developing Yebis 10 years ago. For each new platform (18 as of today) we ported it to, we have always been keen on extracting highest performance by taking advantages of the specificities of the platforms” Kawase explained. “So again for Xbox One, of course we use eSRAM for internal calculation and internal buffers. The unified memory architecture is less of need for us since everything happens in the GPU.”

It’s important to note here that Kawase is not criticizing the PlayStation 4’s architecture as he is simply commenting on what works best for the middleware. As Yebis 2 allows the developers to create amazing real-time post processing effects utilizing HDR rendering, it’s obvious that most of the stuff happens within the GPU.

We will have more for Yebis 2 in the coming days so stay tuned for more news and updates.

Thoughts? Let us know below.

If there’s any criticism that has been pointed out the Xbox One the most since its release, it’s been the viability of the console’s eSRAM. While some developers have praised it for its tile-streaming capabilities, others have blamed it as being the reason for the console’s inability to reach 1080p/60 FPS on most games.

Following up on our last conversation, GamingBolt spoke to Confetti FX’s Wolfgang Engel, the man who headed the development of the RAGE engine for Rockstar titles  like Grand Theft Auto 4, Read Dead Redemption, Midnight Club Los Angeles and many more in the past, about the potential of the Xbox One’s eSRAM and whether developers would be utilizing this feature any time soon.

Engel stated, “eSRAM is very fast memory. In general the biggest challenge that game developers are facing are memory access patterns, so while we have a lot of computation power, the memory access cost is increasing substantially over the last ten years, compared to the cost of arithmetic instructions.

“As long as you are in registers you are fine but as soon as you need to access memory, it becomes slower. So the challenge is to access memory in the most efficient way.

“Therefore memory access patterns are the most important optimization strategies. So it’s not about counting cycles but it’s about thinking how can we re-factor an algorithm so that we can access memory in a more efficient way. eSRAM is part of that.

“For example with a compute shader you can access cache memory (thread group shared memory) so you can re-factor your algorithm so that it uses this memory better, resulting in a huge and substantial speed ups. With the Xbox One, the introduction of eSRAM has a similar idea.

“The memory expensive draw calls can be rendered into eSRAM. When you don’t need so much memory bandwidth, you use the regular system memory. You have to plan ahead, you have to think how you are going to use the memory, in the most optimal way. So eSRAM gives you an advantage if you do this. For one of our games, we used eSRAM by creating an excel sheet first, that shows how we are going to use eSRAM through the stages of the rendering pipeline. This helped us utilize the speed improvements that were coming from the eSRAM.”

Wolfgang definitely has a valid point. Developers can see the benefits of eSRAM only when they plan for it and use it accordingly. We do know that Crytek used it intelligently when developing Ryse Son of Rome and it will be interesting to see how developers utilize it in the coming years.

What are your thoughts on the same? Let us know in the comments.

This is just a snippet of our interview with Confetti and we will have more in the coming days.