INSIDE MAN: Microsoft's Boyd Multerer on creating the Xbox One

[Showan]

"It wasn't fun," he says. "But actually, now that I'm past it and I can look back - I think that it actually vindicates one of the strategies that we had. One of the goals was to create an architecture that can change over time, so as those changes were happening, we could roll with it without it dramatically effecting the kits we were giving to game developers. We were able to keep that train running and keep the games in development while we were scrambling to adjust to policy changes and business changes over at the other side, and it actually helped to make all that manageable."

App it up

He holds that the app-based interface, on top of a Dashboard that's just a lightweight "shell" has proved its worth too. "The shell itself is quite thin, and it was a design goal to put as much of that functionality into those apps. We want people to be writing apps themselves, right? So we said hey, let's use the exact same thing. That allows us to continue working on those apps and update them individually without having to do the giant 360-style rolled-up update."

"There's a whole bunch of post-effects that you can run. We do the right kinds of anti-aliasing, you can do shadow rendering and all that, and you do those things in the really, really fast RAM that's in the back of the pipeline, and you end up with an image that looks significantly better in some ways, and it's becoming less clear whether this is a number of pixels count story or whether this is a quality of pixels story. Both matter, but it's not all about one number or the other number."

It's a noble sentiment, but one that's been lost on the howling wastes of the internet, where early adopters have raged over every pixel. It's not a problem Multerer expects to last; now that developers have had time to get used to the architecture, they'll be able to get more out of it.

"I fully expect that to happen," he says. "The GPUs are really complicated beasts this time around. In the Xbox 360 era, getting the most performance out of the GPU was all about ordering the instructions coming into your shader. It was all about hand-tweaking the order to get the maximum performance. In this era, that's important - but it's not nearly as important as getting all your data structures right so that you're getting maximum bandwidth usage across all the different buffers. So it's relatively easy to get portions of the GPU to stall. You have to have it constantly being fed."


It's a noble sentiment, but one that's been lost on the howling wastes of the internet, where early adopters have raged over every pixel. It's not a problem Multerer expects to last; now that developers have had time to get used to the architecture, they'll be able to get more out of it.

"I fully expect that to happen," he says. "The GPUs are really complicated beasts this time around. In the Xbox 360 era, getting the most performance out of the GPU was all about ordering the instructions coming into your shader. It was all about hand-tweaking the order to get the maximum performance. In this era, that's important - but it's not nearly as important as getting all your data structures right so that you're getting maximum bandwidth usage across all the different buffers. So it's relatively easy to get portions of the GPU to stall. You have to have it constantly being fed."


If that sounds complicated, it gets worse: getting your Xbox One game to run smoothly requires shuffling data between different components with absolute precision; even the smallest delay can hold up the entire process. "This is a effectively a super-computer design," he says. "This is a design out of the super-computer realm. So I expect that we're going to continue to see fairly large improvements in GPU output as people really tune these data sets."

It isn't surprising that most publishers, running flat out to release games on every available format before Christmas, didn't have the time to sort this out. "Xbox One was a crazy launch. All console launches are crazy. Me and the team, we've all worked seven days a week from June until November, and we're all really tired and all the game companies; they were there too. So in a lot of cases it was "Okay, we've got to get the game running" and then there's not a whole lot of time to do the tuning."

The console itself is - terrifying mathematics aside - a lot more welcoming to developers than Xbox 360, too. "The basic box is definitely easier to develop for, and that goes a long way. We spent a lot of time making sure that if you know how to write a game in DirectX in Windows, you already know how to write a game in Xbox One, and the games that are being written for Windows 8 that are using DX are porting really quickly to Xbox One. Like often in a day, maybe two. Yes, you have to tweak for the specific performance characteristics of this box but you basically already know how to do it, if you've developed for Windows. It's more complicated than that, but yeah."



Full read here: http://www.totalxbox.com/74852/features/inside-man-microsofts-boyd-multerer-on-creating-the-xbox-one/

[blerk]

I'm curious to see more about this 'supercomputer-like' architecture that they're talking about. When I hear supercomputer, I think of massively parallel devices that need insane amounts of clever data shuffling, and that jives with what he says. But when I think of current PCs (and the programs/games that run on them), parallelism is ..not exactly what I think of. (One of the things I think of is the Cell on the PS3 :P)

 

So I look forwards to seeing more as they talk about the architecture and design, especially in conjunction with future PC game architecture concepts and DirectX 12. It will be interesting to see game performance benefits as well: If it's apparently so easy to make a DirectX PC game run relatively well on XB1, I want to see what precisely is the result when this apparently new architecture is fully utilized. 

[Hedon]

Oddly enough, we read this interview last year. Not sure why it's been dug up again by that website.