Microsoft continues its drawn out PR offensive for the Xbox One in a new interview with two of the heads of the system’s designers. For Andrew Goosen and Nick Baker, the Xbox One design was all about balance, the balance between power and performance.
Of course, a lot of parts of this interview is filled with jargon and descriptions that may not be useful, or is easy to misinterpret, so we have taken some of the more salient and easy to understand points from the whole piece.
First off, coming off of the Xbox 360 post mortem, they decided to switch around to multiprocessor instead of more power hungry CPU cores. Now, the Xbox One cores will be better optimized for power and performance, and both CPU and GPU will be low latency, high bandwidth.
In regards to the system’s multiple OSes, virtualization was a part of the design from the start. The design team wanted to make sure that the game was as undisturbed as possible while they were switching OSes around. The setup also allows the OSes to update themselves independently of each other, and if one of the OSes hangs or crashes, the others will keep operating.
Their choice of eight Jaguar cores over four Piledriver cores was again one about power and performance optimization. Whereas Piledriver looks better on paper, it also requires more to be more optimized, and simply isn’t as familiar as Jaguar to be used as efficiently.
Their choice of ESRAM with DDR3 over GDDR5 is substantially the same. Xbox One’s designer argue this time that this setup gives them more bandwidth. ESRAM was also a design decision bourne out of a failing of the otherwise well made Xbox 360. While the 360 was miles easier to develop for than the PS3, its EDRAM often took on certain render targets that were better handled by other memory. In the Xbox One, ESRAM and DDR memory is connected more directly, and so tasks can be handled and passed between them more efficiently.
Microsoft also deliberately allowed developers to choose their game’s resolutions, which is why you now hear of games like Ryse: Son of Rome not reaching full 1080p. They originally did intend to force developers to run a minimum 720p and made this one of the Technical Certification Requirements, but they later axed it. They realized that developers would themselves want to place their games at higher resolutions if they could, but more importantly, the developers themselves can make the proper tradeoffs between resolution and per-pixel quality.
Inevitable, the comparison between Sony and Microsoft was raised, and where it was obvious that Sony was trying to build the most powerful hardware they could make for this generation again, Microsoft looked at it from the end of avoiding bottlenecks. In their line of thinking, that one little nagging bottleneck could become the one bottleneck that hampers development on their console completely.
Microsoft’s approach gives them higher clock speeds, higher frame rates, and better overall performance. In their estimation, Sony has placed a big bet on more compute units to assist on GPGPU workloads, while Microsoft placed it on higher bandwidth. On one end, Sony and Microsoft actually agree here: it’s important to strike a balance when designing a new gaming console.
Source: Reddit
