JoeTheBro said:
So the new thing going around is that the new XBONE update brings 1080p. I don't blame people for believing it, since it's actually possible.
Modern games with deferred rendering usually have large frame buffers. These buffers need to be stored in ESRAM on the XBONE, but they go in GDDR5 RAM on the PS4. At 1080p with tons of effects a next gen game could have a 64MB buffer. That would fit in the 8 GB GDDR5 RAM on the PS4, but it wouldn't fit in the 32 MB ESRAM on the XBONE. Hence in this situation the dev would have to decrease the size of the buffer to make it fit in the ESRAM. Lowering the resolution is the simplest approach. At 720p the buffer fits so that's what most devs would do in this situation. The new update supposedly fixes that so somehow the 64 MB buffer fits in the 32 MB ESRAM. Maybe the cloud upgrades the ESRAM to 64 MB. Even if the update had Microsoft technicians go to every single owners house and install bunches of RAM, it wouldn't really matter. That's what people seem to be forgetting.
ESRAM is a bottleneck that does exist and needs to be dealt with by devs, but it's not the main reason XBONE games look worse than PS4. It's pretty simple to prove this conceptually too. I think most people can understand rendering a game at 1080p 30fps and rendering at 720p 60fps use about the same amount of power. The differences in resolution and framerate basically balence each other out. So if for some reason you were to lower the resolution of a game, in almost all cases it would increase the framerate. Titanfall according to the ESRAM theory could be running 1080p 60fps, but the devs had to lower it to 792p to fit the buffer in memory. Lowering the resolution to 792p would free up so many GPU resources that the game shouldn't have any problems keeping a rock solid framerate, except it does. The beta drops down into the 40s and hovers around there towards the end of matches. Yes this is a beta and I fully expect the framerate to be improved for launch, but it also shows that the beta is being restricted by GPU power even at the low resolution. Fixing the ESRAM size issues would make it possible to render the game in 1080p, but it'd still need to drop the framerate to hit it. Titanfall beta with even 256 MB of ESRAM running in 1080p would be like 20fps. Same thing applies to every other XBONE game with framerate issues. This update would probably get games like Powerstar golf and Plants Verse Zombies in 1080p. It could even get Sniper Elite 3 in 1080p. It's not however going to have any effect on the big graphic intensive games. MGS: GZ, the Witcher 3, and Watchdogs are still going to be sub 1080p on the XBONE.
TLDR :Here's the best analogy. There's a really nice house you want but it's not for sale and you only have $100. Fixing ESRAM puts the house on the market, but you still only have $100.
|
There's a ton of 1080P games on Xbox One already. 60 FPS 1080P too (Fifa 14, Madden 25, Forza 5 etc). They just dont get any attention because it doesn't fit the narrative.
For the rest of your post, "it depends". The Xone has a faster CPU and a faster GPU clock (more triangles) than PS4 among other advantages (more peak bandwidth, etc).
My guess is over time the gap will close to nothing. Most likely PS4 is blanced where only 14 CU's can really help rendering, so it's basically the same as Xbox, and/or CPU limited. Right now devs are struggling with ESRAM, but they will figure it out. The Xbox is the more complex system, thus it will improve more in time, and take more time to fully tap.
