Xbox One 1080p Obstacle Not Solved by DirectX 12, Witcher Dev Says

When the next iteration of Microsoft's DirectX software was unveiled at GDC in March, the company promised that it would bring "richer scenes, more objects, and full utilization of modern GPU hardware" for future games on Microsoft platforms. But according to one game developer, this upgraded API will not improve the ability to render games at 1080p on Xbox One.

CD Projekt Red, developer of upcoming RPG The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, stated in an interview with GamingBolt that DirectX 12 would not make it easier to run at higher resolutions. Lead engine programmer Balazs Torok explained, "Most games out there can't go 1080p because the additional load on the shading units would be too much. For all these games DX12 is not going to change anything."

Torok said that games might technically be able to run at 1080, but it won't matter because the resource cost of shading those extra pixels would be too high. "They might be able to push more triangles to the GPU but they are not going to be able to shade them, which defeats the purpose," he said.

Since the console's launch last November, there's been controversy surrounding the apparent difficulties developers have when attempting to get their games running at 1080p resolution. June's update to the Xbox One software development kit--different than DirectX--opened up an additional 10 percent processing power for developers to use, which has helped some games like Destiny reach 1080p on the console.

We've reached out to CD Projekt Red for clarification of these statements and will update the story with any new information we receive.

The Witcher 3 launches on February 24 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC. According to CD Projekt Red's CEO, the developer is running into a little more difficulty with getting the game to run at 1080p on Xbox One than on PS4.