Xbox One’s eSRAM is the cause of Xbox One’s struggle to output games at 1080p.
That’s according to Rebellion Games’ Jean-Baptiste Bolcato, who told GamingBolt that his team faced a real struggle getting in-development Sniper Elite 3 to hit full HD on the machine.
“It was clearly a bit more complicated to extract the maximum power from the Xbox One when you’re trying to do that. I think eSRAM is easy to use,” he said.
“Part of the problem is that it’s just a little bit too small to output 1080p within that size. It’s such a small size within there that we can’t do everything in 1080p with that little buffer of super-fast RAM. It means you have to do it in chunks or using tricks, tiling it and so on.
“It’s a bit like the reverse of the PS3. PS3 was harder to program for than the Xbox 360. Now it seems like everything has reversed but it doesn’t mean it’s far less powerful – it’s just a pain in the ass to start with. We are on fine ground now but the first few months were hell.”
Fortunately, Bolcato believes that the issue is one that can be addressed with improvements to the developer SDK.
“They are releasing a new SDK that’s much faster and we will be comfortably running at 1080p on Xbox One,” he assured. “We were worried six months ago and we are not anymore, it’s got better and they are quite comparable machines.
“The Xbox One is a bit more multimedia, a bit more hub-centric so its a bit more complex. There’s stuff you can and can’t do because it’s a sort of multimedia hub. PS4 doesn’t have that. PS4 is just a games machine.”