With the advent of the PS4/PS4 Pro and Xbox One S/Xbox One X, console developers have been better accustomed to tweaking their games for multiple hardware configurations, but Microsoft may have their work cut out for them with its “Lockhart” plan. In the latest episode of Kotaku’s Splitscreen podcast, Jason Schreier claims that third-party developers aren’t happy with the cheaper next-gen Xbox because of the power gap it’s created: Lockhart reportedly includes “significantly” less RAM, making it much more difficult to port a game that was designed around the premium Xbox, “Anaconda.”
I’ve heard some skepticism from third-party developers, who are, like, “Hey, it’s a pain in the ass to ship on multiple hardware SKUs. Second of all, this is going to hamper us, because Microsoft is requiring us to ship on this lower-powered version, that has the equivalent graphical power of a PS4 Pro.” It’s worth noting, that is has a higher-end CPU and a solid-state drive, and other next-gen features, so it’s not safe to compare it directly to the PS4 Pro.
The way it’s been described to me…I think [Lockhart] is going to have significantly less RAM, but the CPU makes a big difference, especially when it comes to framerate. The SSD makes a huge difference when it comes to loading times. So, I think what [devs] can do a lot of the time is knock down the texture quality, take a hit on the resolution, but you don’t have to sacrifice framerate as much.