Despite most gamers being unable to tell the difference between 720p Xbox One games upscaled to 1080p and native 1080p games on the PS4, the Internet has exploded with rage over the subject. If you’re looking for a place to point your pitchforks, folks, look no further than that camera bar staring up at you from your entertainment center.
It has been suspected for a quite a while now that Microsoft was going to be a bit behind Sony when it came to the launch of the Xbox One. Sony’s console has only slightly better specs, but it has never been considered enough to create a noticeable difference betwene the two machines.
As we got closer to the console launch dates, it began to leak out that some of the Xbox One titles would be playing at a lower resolution than the PS4. Just about every site has a title about 720p vs 1080p on some of the top launch games, which is enough to upset anyone eager to get their hands on an Xbox One. If the consoles are so similar, why are we seeing this performance drop?
The answer is actually in multiple parts. Currently, game developers are struggling to get their games shipping with the console launch, so optimizing for the hardware isn’t a priority or luxury they have. In a recent interview with Infinity Ward’s executive producer Mark Rubin, he explained that they put new technology into Call of Duty: Ghosts before they even had the consoles. Now that they have the consoles, they can start to optimize things. This doesn’t help Call of Duty: Ghosts fans, but the next iteration of the franchise will benefit from this polish instead.
It’s not all on the developers, though. Even those who had very early access to the consoles were dealing with versions of the OS that were far from complete. Several developers complained that Microsoft was way behind on updates for the hardware in the Xbox One, and that platform agnostic builds of games would run at noticeably lower resolution with a dramatically decreased FPS count on the Xbox One during development.
It was widely suspected that these delays were why Microsoft was still using high end PCs to show off launch titles at gaming conferences. As a result, developers weren’t really able to optimize their games as much as they could with Sony’s console.
The biggest perpetrator to the performance dip on the Xbox One, however, is itself. More specifically, the mandatory accessory for the Xbox One that activates some of the really cool controller free features that have helped define the Xbox consoles over the last few years. The Kinect is an undeniably cool accessory, but the performance hit the Xbox One takes in order to power one isn’t cool at all. In order to be constantly awake for things like skeletal tracking and voice recognition, the Kinect currently consumes 10% of GPU time at a minimum.
The good news, at least as good as it can get under the circumstances, is that all of this is the result of the launch rush. Microsoft will optimize the processor consumption of the Kinect with a software update, as well as make sure their drivers are more polished, and game developers will have more time to focus on optimizing their games for this future experience.
Unfortunately, this means that the launch titles for the Xbox One will be similar to the launch titles for almost every other console launch ever. Fortunately, because the games are scaled to 1080p (in some cases even at 60fps) it’s not like the experience is really all that different to begin with.
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