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.