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Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox One game console have been criticized for relatively low performance compared to Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 4 for a number of times. Late last year Microsoft enabled some additional computing horsepower in its system, but game developers yet have to take advantage of that. At least one software designer said that Microsoft’s action could actually boost performance in games.
Microsoft’s Xbox One video game system is powered by a custom system-on-chip featuring eight general-purpose AMD “Jaguar” x86 processing cores. While six of the cores have been available for game developers, two were reserved for the operating system and Kinect functionality. Late last year Microsoft allowed game designers to use seven out of eight x86 cores (i.e., unlocked the seventh CPU core), but so far not a lot of software makers have truly used the capability, or at least have not talked about it yet.
Jehanne Rousseau, chief executive officer of Spiders, the company behind The Technomancer game, is the first game developer to talk about benefits that “extra” general-purpose core could bring.
“We are not using it yet but this is only a matter of time,” said Mr. Rousseau, in an interview with Gamingbolt. “This is very interesting for us to have access to this processor. We will use it to do a part of our computations to smooth the frame rate. In fact, we designed our new engine to be very flexible about the number of processors. With mainly in mind the numerous PC designs, but this will also be useful for this seventh processor.”
AMD's semi-custom SoC for Microsoft Xbox One. Image by iFixit.com
The seventh core can be utilized in multiple ways to boost performance of Xbox One. It can be used for artificial intelligence or real-time physics computing. Alternatively, it can be used to just feed the data to the graphics processing unit to boost framerates.
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KitGuru Says: While it is obvious that more is better when it comes to the number of CPU cores, it remains to be seen how fast game developers learn how to use the seventh core. For example, game engines designed in 2013 – 2014 use only six x86 cores of the Xbox One SoC and enabling another core will not speed them up unless programmers get back to their code.
In the meanwhile PCs with triple the processing power can’t even use 4 cores/threads efficiently with DX11.
That’s Microsoft for you. Sabotaging the PC platform so that they sell more potato boxes that struggle to get 30fps at 900p. DX12 should have come 2+ years ago and if it wasn’t for AMD pushing Mantle we would still be struggling with poor multi threading and low draw cell figures.
It’s still not going to make it even with the PS4, but a bump in FPS for the XBO is equally good for the PS4.
Over hyped. One cpu is not going to give them much help…
oh great, that means 1/7 more CPU power, yeahhhhh, 1 more AMD Kabini Tablet Core…
This will mage a HUGE impact!
Next time, please use Zen CPU Cores, 8 or 12 or 16 for that matter.
I thought they said they wouldn’t do this so people with older xbones didn’t feel like, well an bunch of *****
I agree. It should have came out at LEAST 3 to 4 years ago.
Back on August 1st, 2012, they should have had DirectX 12 ready, not DX11.1
Just Imagine the changes if DX12 was released then, so figure Q4 2012, 2013+ games could have used it.
That could have easily helped with many optimization issues over the years (not all, but many of them).
Year old news. Why are we hearing this again?
… it’s not like new xboxes will have one additional core, they just unlocked previously reserved processing power.
“next time” haha
And that’s not making it better how?
old and new are all the same. you just need to upgrade the firmware.
Did you not read the article? The game developers don’t have the code in the games to access that 7th core yet. So it’s still using the same 6 cores it was before and hasn’t boosted performance yet.
Just just an updates