Even though I'm a confirmed playstation and ps4 fan (see my post history if you care to), after reading some confusing and conflicting commentary on the subject,I wanted to discuss dx12 on the xbone with a friend who knows about these things (he works for a sizeable US dev). It was around 2 weeks ago when I simply asked him:
"Is dx12 going to help the bone?"...
and this was his reply, edited slightly, mostly for formatting, take from it what you will:
"It's going to help a lot. dx10 was a really nice clean API, but had masses of cpu side overhead. dx11 introduced better utilization of multi-threading in CPU among other things, but dx11 on xb1 is very poorly optimized. In fact it was even slower than 360 in some cases - before launch we saw draw calls on xbox one performing worse than equivalent on 360. Trying to get launch titles running well on this (largely broken) version of dx was difficult. We, as most devs, simply took our existing PC dx11 engine and worked from there. Microsoft introduced a catalog of lower-level API updates that bypassed dx11 to gain direct access to GPU, which helped considerably. In effect, this more mantle-like approach of dx12 is already in place to a small extent via a series of hacks.
Microsoft are making all the right noises when they communicate with us, but it's hard to ignore the mess they made of dx11 on xbox one. Apparently their internal policies and availability of staff came into play at the time. Most of the core xbox team was working hard to fix a variety of other issues back then and it was some windows team or other in the driving seat for dx11 on xbox one.
This time, with dx12, they can focus on producing a really good API. With many xbox one titles actually being CPU-bound, this mantle-like approach should help considerably. It will still be a slower box than ps4, that's unavoidable at the hardware level, and of course the ps4 API is not static - it, too, will continue to improve over time."
That was about it for the xbox one part of our chat. I'm not sure if it's interesting to anyone here, it was interesting to me so I put it here.
Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2026, including an update on its gaming Xbox business and more.
Not looking good. Hopefully Asha Sharma is able to turn Phil’s disaster around.
To me it's still quite remarkable how they can cash-in 5.3bn in revenue in a single quarter, since their hardware is basically dead.
The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.
Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.
15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.
These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse
The charity event will be streamed live from Gamescom in August.
Thanks to the slip-up of an artist working on the title, we now have more evidence that a new Injustice game is in the works.
I like this post. I agree, that both systems have static APIs, and they will both improve. TBH tho, I think the gap is highly exaggerated by PS fans to begin with, and the implementation of DX12 and dedication to streamlining games for MS's console, (probably mostly from 1st-party devs) will result in easily comparable graphical power in the long run. If we have learned anything from the past, it's that even with old machines, (including PCs) the more a particular studio or developer works with a certain system/engine/set of tools, the better the graphics they can produce become.
Very interesting and goes against what i have heard elsewhere that the effect on PC will be big but relatively non existant on Xbone, its just another PR exercise and devs already have low level access on consoles.
But... Time will tell:-)