Apparently Microsoft wasn’t confident in their own product during E3. The beautiful games that you played during the Electronic Entertainment Expo were HP powered, running on windows 7 systems with Nvidia’s 700 series GTX GPU.
Why is this important? Well, first of all one of the three operating systems embedded into the Xbox One is windows 8, not 7, and for those of you who don’t know this generation of consoles is powered by AMD. Both the Xbox One and the PS4 will run on modified AMD GPUs. What does this mean? It means that the Xbox One games that were showcased at E3 may not be representative of the final product. The GPUs that were used are from a different manufacturer.
So the fact that Xbox One games are not even running on Xbox One dev kits is rather unsettling. One can understand that they want to showcase their games in the best way possible, they want to sell the system after all, but come on! At least use an AMD GPU and windows 8!
An AMD employee revealed that the multi-year deal between Microsoft and AMD is worth $3+ Billion, and that AMD provided a “custom silicon solution to Microsoft for the Xbox One”.
Could this be considered false advertising?
Who knows. According to EA COO Peter Moore the games they were showing off on stage were running on comparable dev kit specs to the actual home console.
“The error screen had a lot going on, including an information box that revealed the current HDD space usage. If you look carefully the dev unit was using 385gb out of 423gb. When you factor in how manufacturers rate the drives you get actual usable space of 465gb. Now subtract that from what we saw on the crash screen and we get roughly 42gb of reserved system data that is not user accessible. That number could decrease or increase on actual retail systems.”
Meanwhile, PS4 games were running on actual PS4 dev kits (not high-end PCs). Sony’s PS4 is powered by a semi-custom AMD APU. This processor is a single-chip custom processor, with eight x86-64 AMD Jaguar CPU cores and 1.84 TFLOPS next-gen AMD Radeon based graphics engine supported by 8GB GDDR5 memory.
