While we have to wait to see how significant the Xbox One X has been to Microsoft’s overall hardware sales, it’s at the very least been successful with its performance. Keep in mind that this is a system whose CPU isn’t all that much more powerful than the Xbox One. But with a vastly superior GPU and 12 GB GDDR5 RAM, Microsoft have managed to live up to their claims of this being the “most powerful console ever.”
If you think about it, the removal of eSRAM from the original Xbox One while shifting to the Xbox One X was a major step forward. Tripwire Interactive, which developed Killing Floor 2, offered more information on the benefits of eSRAM removal when it spoke to GamingBolt. Associate producer David Amata and technical director Andrew Ladenberger break it down.
When asked how helpful Microsoft has been with regards to the SDK (especially since it took four hours of programming to get the game running on the Xbox One X), they said, “A lot of that can be attributed to just how similar the two architectures are from each other with the most significant difference being the removal of eSRAM from the Xbox One X. In terms of SDK, the two platforms share the same deployment process for development, so it’s been a smooth process to work simultaneously on both base and X hardware.”
How has the removal of eSRAM benefitted the developer and was it an issue when porting from the base Xbox One to the Xbox One X? The duao said, “The additional memory bandwidth available was a welcome change as it helps carry the load of streaming in higher resolution textures faster and disabling eSRAM was a painless process.”
Finally, how does the Xbox One X SDK compare to the base Xbox One when developing Killing Floor 2? “Because all the Xbox deployment and software used for Xbox One X is identical to base Xbox One, there has been no real difference in our development pipeline between the two platforms. As a result, getting up and running and using the full hardware of Xbox One X has been a seamless process for our talented development team.”
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