Xbox One ESRAM Is A Bottleneck, DirectX 12 Is Not The Solution

One of the issues of the Xbox One so far has been that in terms of pure hardware grunt, it’s outmatched by the PlayStation 4. This has led to multiplats generally being better on Sony’s console, and on the Xbox One, they routinely fail to bit the ‘next gen’ resolution of 1080p. And while a whole host of recent developments- the decoupling of the Kinect from the console, which frees up system resources, a new SDK, and the introduction of DirectX 12 APIs to the console- have fostered the hope that these issues may soon be a thing of the past, apparently, the issue comes from somewhere else entirely, and it’s too fundamental to be fixed.

Stardock’s CEO Brad Wardell, took to his Twitter again to talk about the Xbox One. He explained that Microsoft cheaped out on the RAM, which creates a physical memory bandwidth bottleneck, causing issues for developers trying to reach 1080p. He also said that DirectX 12 wasn’t necessarily helpful- performance boosts will be directly proportional to the number of on screen objects, he said, which should be great for a game like an RTS, but meaningless for something like an FPS. You know, the kinds of games Xbox One will have the most of.

Of course, all said and done, all of this is meaningless- if a game is great, it is great, and specs don’t matter. But at the very least, this shows us why developers seem to prefer the development environment provided by Sony for the PS4 to Microsoft’s erstwhile industry defining Xbox environment.