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Xbox One’s chief product officer Marc Whitten has claimed that the console will offer “the best-looking games in the living room” – despite PS4’s specs appearing to provide more raw power to developers.
Speaking with Game Informer about Xbox One and the differences in power offered between PS4’s 8GB GDDR5 and Xbox One’s 8GB DDR3, Whitten said that he was “not close enough to really understand how [Sony’s] system works, [but] I will say that I think the way that we’ve balanced our system is really key in terms of two things.
“The first one is, we believe that we’re going to have amazing experiences that are clearly next-gen. I think you guys saw some experiences, I think they set a bar that’s very, very high. I think our games are going to look great – I think they’re going to be the best-looking games in the living room.”
Whitten believes that “at a gaming level, the ability to create a modern gaming experience where LIVE and the apps and services you can run at the same time as the game… will really change that experience,” with additional processing power offered by the cloud providing “yet another ability to access power and drive an experience at a very different level”.
Xbox One will let developers take advantage of cloud-side “elastic computation”, providing them with “immense computing power” to deliver “much larger matches” and “larger worlds”.
“What we’re trying to do is to ensure that our creators have access to elastic computation which gives them immense computing power,” Whitten continues, “so like the ability to do the things that you could not do without massive data centres backing it.
“I think we’ll see it used in things like much larger matches that are much more persistent and consistent. I think you’ll see it for larger worlds… Most games today have this bounding box where the AI is simulated and then outside of the bounding box it’s a very loose simulation. Suddenly they’ll be able to run the AI in the entire world all at the same time.
“And I think the types of creativity that’s going to come from that is really unparalleled. We’ve spent a lot of time on how to build in raw access to our system into LIVE with that compute capability so it’s really easy for developers to take advantage of it.”
Xbox One was announced in Washington last night alongside next-gen titles Forza Motorsport 5, FIFA 14, EA Sports UFC, Quantum Break and Call of Duty: Ghosts.
The console is due to release later this year.
Source: Game Informer
