The Xbox One and Xbox One X are miles apart in terms of their hardware, and how accomplished they are at doing what they set out to do. But for now, the full extent of Xbox One X’s capabilities may be constrained just a little- if only because these are early days, and because games that hit it also have to run on the far weaker Xbox One and Xbox One S.
However, over time, the gulf in quality of software across the Xbox One and Xbox One X should only become more apparent- this is something that Super Lucky’s Tale Paul Bettner said in an interview with Gamepost.
“I think there will be developers that push the Xbox One X even further than we have,” Bettner said. “I mean, we’re one of the first to get the dev kit and we’re one of the first games shipping natively on this device, but it’s always the case that once more people get their hands on the hardware and have worked with it for longer that they start squeezing even way more performance out of it, and so the gap between the two devices is probably gonna grow over time. The Xbox One, at this point, is a well-understood piece of hardware that has a lot of the optimizations and that work has already been done, but for the Xbox One X, that’s just starting.”
It does make sense- you get more out of hardware the more you learn about it, and you can only learn about it with time. I have to assume that Microsoft will eventually remove the mandate that all Xbox One X games have to run on Xbox One, too- maybe a few years down the line- which will additionally leave developers free to leverage the Xbox One fully. It will be interesting to see where things end on the system as time goes on, for sure.