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.
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.
