Xbox One’s GPU is going to be receiving a nice boost of extra performance, 8 percent to be exact if this latest rumor is true. FamousMortimer, also known as Pete Dodd has revealed plans that the 10% reserve of the X1’s GPU is being turned to only 2%.
Pete Dodd said on twitter: “10% reserved gpu getting turned into 2% soon. And with that, I’m on my last bar leaving Puerto Rico. See ya soon if St. Thomas has sprint.
FamousMortimer then added, “Gpu for that certain system had 10% reserved. 8% video. 2% voice. Voice will remain. That video 8% will be up to devs. As it should be.”
So what will that mean for games developers and performance on the Xbox One? Well, firstly remember that the performance of the Xbox One’s GPU (1.32TFLOPS) is still the same. Indeed, the 10 percent reserve of the X1’s GPU bought this number down to around 1.24TFLOPS. This means that we’ll instead be seeing a number of around 1.3TFLOPS of computing performance for the Xbox One.
Let’s take a look at for example the latest news that Tomb Raider on the X1 will only run at 1080P 30 (peaking at 45-ish FPS in less busy scenes) vs the Playstation 4’s 1080P 60FPS. In this case, we’ll be seeing the ‘average’ frame rate raise by around 2 – 3 FPS. So in the title should now run at around 33FPS average. Of course, long term it will means that developers will be able to pack in better effects, better textures, better post-processing and so on.
It won’t be a revolution, and as I’ve said before many times, there’s a huge difference between the resolution of even 1080P vs 900P (around 40-ish percent). 1080P (1920×1080), the console is required to output 2073600 pixels. 900P (1600×900) meanwhile is 1440000 pixels, and 720P (1280×720) is only 921600 pixels. So if a game is just about hitting 30FPS at 900P, we’ll certainly not be seeing the game suddenly internally rendered at 1080P. That is unless the Frame Rate was frame locked at 30FPS.
In some situations, developers might find that the game was running at say 45 – 55 FPS and they found that it was better to maintain 30FPS. In which cases there might be enough spare performance left over for 1080P. It’s rare, and frankly developers would likely instead put the extra performance to use on better looking effects. Both the PS4’s 1.84TFLOPS and the Xbox One’s 1.32TFLOPS of compute power are relatively weak compared to a desktop PC.
The relatively cheap R7 260x (around 100 pounds) has around 1.97TFLOPS of computing power. So what we’re going to take away from this is Microsoft have made a great decision. Although it’s not unexpected given all of the negative news recently regarding the Xbox One’s performance. Hopefully we’ll be seeing it paying off in games soon. Albert Penello has recently addressed this in a podcast, but no doubt actual numbers gamer’s can see will be all the more effective.
