Larian Studios: Using extra CPU-core Xbox One ‘doesn’t make much difference’

Swen Vincke, CEO of the Flemish Larian Studios, has said in an interview that the use of the seventh CPU core in the Xbox One “doesn’t make much difference” to the performance. That would be because developers can use up to 60 to 70 percent of the core.

In an interview with GamingBolt, Vincke confirms that the studio uses the seventh core, but due to the limited permitted CPU load, large gains in performance are not forthcoming. In addition, Vincke tells the website that the small amount of embedded SRAM of the Xbox One is not a problem. “We’ve had experience with it through the Xbox 360. We had to make some tweaks to make it work. But overall we have the same frame rate as the PS4 version.” Compared to the PS4, the Xbox One has slower working memory, but 32MB of Esram supplements the DDR3 memory and has to partly compensate for this due to its speed.

Documentation leaked during the Christmas season of 2014 stated that Microsoft had made the decision to give game developers more extensive access to the Xbox One’s CPU cores. Where it used to be the case that a developer had six of the eight cores at his disposal, after an update in October of 2014, part of an extra CPU core would be available to the developer. This should narrow the gap between the performance of the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4. On the other hand, if a developer deploys the seventh core, he can no longer use certain Kinect functionalities such as voice commands.

Larian Studios is working with the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in the development of Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition. It should be released in October for those two platforms, but also for Windows.