Tweet
The race for 4K gaming has begun. PlayStation 4 Pro is in the marketplace, and while success in supporting ultra HD gaming varies dramatically between releases, an established series of techniques is in place that is already capable of effectively servicing a 4K resolution with a comparatively modest level of GPU power. In the wake of its E3 2016 reveal for the new Project Scorpio console, Microsoft began to share details with developers on how they expect to see 4K supported on its new hardware. A whitepaper was released on its development portal, entitled 'Reaching 4K and GPU Scaling Across Multiple Xbox Devices'. It's a fascinating outlook on Microsoft's ultra HD plans - and it also reveals more about the Scorpio hardware itself. For starters, Xbox One's contentious ESRAM is gone.A small, but ultra-fast array of embedded static memory integrated into the Xbox One processor itself, ESRAM was the high-bandwidth scratchpad designed to mitigate for the lower-speed DDR3 system RAM on which the Xbox hardware relied. An evolution of the eDRAM attached to the Xbox 360 GPU, ESRAM is massively fast but suffers from one major shortcoming - the lack of it. Microsoft's whitepaper categorically rules out ESRAM for Scorpio, while at the same time suggesting that developers continue to support it to ensure strong performance on legacy Xbox One hardware.
"ESRAM remains essential to achieving high performance on both Xbox One and Xbox One S," the whitepaper reveals. "However, Project Scorpio and PC are not provided with ESRAM. Because developers are not allowed to ship a Project Scorpio-only SKU, optimising for ESRAM remains critical to performance on Microsoft platforms."
Read more…
More...