The senior producer of Sniper Elite 3 has discussed why it's currently harder to get the Xbox One to output at 1080p compared to the PS4, though he reckons this will change with time.

Speaking to Gaming Bolt, Jean-Baptiste Bolcato highlighted some of the differences caused by relying on the eSRAM as opposed to the unified architecture of the PS4.

“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. The only problem is…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.

"They are releasing a new SDK that’s much faster and we will be comfortably running at 1080p on Xbox One. 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.

"At least on paper, [PS4 is] a bit more powerful. But I think the Xbox One is gonna catch up. But definitely there’s this eSRAM. PS4 has 8GB and it’s almost as fast as eSRAM [bandwidth wise] but at the same time you can go a little bit further with it, because you don’t have this slower memory. That’s also why you don’t have that many games running in 1080p, because you have to make it smaller, for what you can fit into the eSRAM with the Xbox One."

It's interesting that he says an SDK update is on the way to help the Xbox One achieve higher performance. This early in the console cycle, it's not hugely surprising that developers are finding one console slightly easier to develop for than the other. As he points out though, it's very likely this will change as time goes on.

"They are releasing a new SDK that’s much faster and we will be comfortably running at 1080p on Xbox One."


If this is true, resolutiongate was fun while it lasted.

"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."

Strange, you have thought last gen would show the advantage of being easier to develop for.

Resolution itself is not that important to me. I want high graphical fidelity with fluid fps, not 1080p no matter what.

The difference in power will be even more if devs decide to go 1080p for mulitplats on Xbone.

Well it only has 16 ROPs ...

Huh? even if by then the xbox one might run comfortably at 1080p?  it  can already do 900p at 60fps..I am not sure what you mean

The SDK won't do wonders, that' all. Never do sacrifice fps or fidelity for resolution.

No doubt development software will improve but Microsoft are active at the moment trying to convince people the xbox one is close to ps4 power. I'm looking forward to getting both consoles at some point but I'm not convinced the xbox one is that competitive with ps4. As the PS4 is comfortably outselling the xbox one I think we will see ps4 move further ahead than previously. Before it was unsure which console would win and a lot of additional development time went into xbox one games over ps4 I think that is changing and the PS4 will become the lead platform even for american developers. I would predict the xbox one will fall further behind. However that doesn't mean 1080p won't be more common on future xbox one titles.

I think Sony's VR helmet is going to do huge numbers perhaps not in the first year but within a year or so of release and I don't think Microsoft will counter with anything to match it. That 32MB of esram is just too limiting.

This is Sony's generation.

The thing is, resolution is just a  technical aspects among others, to reach 1080p sacrifice will be done on other aspects ( effects, physic, framerate, textures, ....) , the power gap wlil always be there in one way or the other, nothing can change that.

It's FUD,a  new SDK doers not over come a 40-50% GPU compute advantage. He also acts like ps4 does not do media, the only diff between the two is hdmi-in port.

Ps4 tools will also improve as will OS overhead.