PS4 VS Xbox One: 1080p 60FPS Impossible For ‘The Witcher 3’ Even With DirectX 12 Update

The PS4 VS Xbox One debate is still continuing to this day, with fanboys bashing or praising their respective gaming consoles while the PC master race crowd are just rolling their eyes. But if a developer says the Xbox One DirectX 12 update won’t help that much, what does that even mean?

In a related report by The Inquisitr, it’s possible that 4k HDTVs will be a waste of money for even PC gamers, never mind PlayStation 4 or Xbone fans.

CD Projekt RED’s lead engine programmer, Balazs Torok, created quite a stir when he claimed the upcoming The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for the Xbox One will not benefit from the DX12 update. GamingBolt asked what the major Xbox One update would mean to video game developers, and this is what Torok said:

“I think there is a lot of confusion around what and why DX12 will improve. Most games out there can’t go 1080p because the additional load on the shading units would be too much. For all these games DX12 is not going to change anything. They might be able to push more triangles to the GPU but they are not going to be able to shade them, which defeats the purpose. To answer the first question, I think we will see a change in the way graphics programmers will think about their pipelines and this will result in much better systems hopefully.”

Some websites interpreted this statement to mean the Xbox One will push more polygons but without any shader effects applied at all, which just completely confuses the picture. The programmer is simply saying that DX12 should help improve triangle batching efficiency, which could increase the number of triangles viable at the same performance levels. I highly doubt he meant the rendered polygons would be completely un-shaded via pixel shaders. Instead, I would interpret the statement to mean that alleviating one potential performance bottleneck does not resolve the main issue of having less graphics cores.

Both the PS4 and Xbox One actually use an identical graphics architecture known as AMD’s GCN technology, although there are some other major design differences I won’t cover here. The major catch is that the Xbox One has 768 graphics cores, while the PS4 has 1,152 cores. Since the two consoles run at similar GPU clockspeeds, the PS4 has 50 percent more raw shader power.

This is not because Microsoft was being cheap; they and Sony simply set their performance goals blindly and independent of each other. AMD knew the eventual outcome, but it would have been a business conflict of interest to warn Microsoft ahead of time they were aiming too low in comparison.

The reason that the DirectX 12 update may not help the Xbox One 1080 60FPS performance catch up to the PS4 is because the PlayStation 4 API can also be optimized in a similar fashion. So any game that is designed for the performance level of the PS4 will have to make some design tradeoffs when being ported to the Xbox One.

In reality, there’s not much more to say about the Xbox One VS PS4 battle. The math is stark despite any marketing attempts at muddying the picture. What do you think?