The Xbox One X is the most powerful home console ever made- we know this. But how powerful is most powerful, really? Apparently, powerful enough that developers are wary of committing to trying to define the system in concrete or analogous terms. Which, to be fair, makes sense- after all, modern technology is nuanced enough that 1:1 comparisons rarely make sense.
And that’s what Adrian Chmielarz of The Astronauts, the folks behind The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, told GamingBolt in an exclusive interview. Asked about what PC GPU would be the most equivalent to the Xbox One X’s, Chmielarz said, “No idea. I could Google that, but that’s be cheating. I know it’s good, but no idea what would be the PC equivalent. It’s not that easy to determine, because there’s many factors to consider, like things that are different in the architecture. It’s not all just about the pure theoretical GPU power.”
He also said that native 4K AAA games could be possible on the Xbox One X, in the hands of talented developers, citing the example of Naughty Dog, and what they are able to get from the PS4’s hardware. “After what Naughty Dog does with PS4, it’s clear that everything is possible.”
Chmielarz also discussed how the Xbox One X’s weaker CPU was balanced against its much stronger CPU, noting that games are often not CPU intensive anyway- and Ethan Carter certainly was not. “Most games are not really burning your CPUs anyway,” he said. “Play anything and watch the processor idling a lot of times. It’s not like games use it as extensively as, say, when you encode a video file.
“Also, Ethan is not really a game that requires a lot of CPU power. For example, we don’t really have any enemies and AI to take care of.”
All of this is of course sensible- that said, no developers are working at exclusively plumbing the Xbox One X hardware and what it has to offer (even Microsoft’s own developers are working on PC and Xbox games, which means they have to tune their games for more hardware configurations).
