Graphics White Papers
A white paper is an educational tool that provides you with an in-depth look at a technical aspect of, or the performance of, a component, feature, function, or process. Most often, a white paper introduces you to subjects to expand your knowledge and to help you build better apps. You’ll also discover white papers that emphasize best practices and solutions to help you work smarter.
Important Check out the full list of white papers on the Xbox Game Developer (XGD) site.
| Category | Title | Description | Author | Date of publication |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Graphics | Managing Xbox Graphics Allocations | The Xbox graphics driver makes various memory allocations on the title’s behalf. Developers can often reduce or eliminate some of these allocations. When every megabyte counts, it’s worthwhile to understand these opportunities and take advantage of them. | Advanced Technology Group | 8/6/2018 |
| Graphics | HDR on Xbox One | New TVs include features (such as HDR, WCG, and 120 Hz) that open a door to possibilities for enhanced image quality. This paper focuses on HDR, specifically implementation details on Xbox One. | 2/14/2018 | |
| Graphics | Automatic Shader Modification for Checkerboard Rendering on Xbox One | Automatic shader modification for checkerboard rendering. | Advanced Technology Group | 1/24/2018 |
| Graphics | Checkerboard Rendering on Xbox One | Checkerboard rendering on Xbox One. | Advanced Technology Group | 1/24/2018 |
| Graphics | Getting Started with HDR | This white paper outlines a number of high level steps that can help make render pipeline changes to successfully implement HDR in a game. | Claude Marais, Advanced Technology Group | 11/14/2016 |
| Graphics | HDR Display Mapping | Most games render an HDR scene that includes values brighter than White. For these bright values to be displayed on an SDR TV, a tone mapping operator is applied to the HDR scene values. This is known as HDR display mapping. | Claude Marais, Advanced Technology Group | 10/28/2016 |
| Graphics | Reaching 4K and GPU Scaling Across Multiple Xbox Devices | This paper presents our recommendations for making the best effective use of the GPU in the forthcoming Xbox One X release. | 7/25/2016 | |
| Graphics | ATG Graphics Engagement Checklist | This paper helps you understand the most effective way to get help from ATG for your title’s graphics-related issues, including how to collect the appropriate information to assist ATG in their analysis. | Advanced Technology Group | 6/23/2016 |
| Graphics | Xbox One Occupancy Quick Reference | This paper provides an easy reference to factors influencing occupancy and also documents LDS bank conflicts. A thorough understanding of how occupancy works is essential in undertaking effective GPU optimization work. | Advanced Technology Group | 5/13/2016 |
| Graphics | Tips for Optimizing Graphics Performance on Xbox One | Provides a variety of quick architectural and performance-tuning tips to help developers make the best use of graphics performance options enabled on Xbox One over the past year. | Advanced Technology Group | 01/04/2016 |
| Graphics | Xbox One GPU Overview | Provides a high-level description of the Xbox One GPU architecture and technical specifications, including updated terminology. A familiarity with this document is suggested before continuing on to other graphics white papers. | Advanced Technology Group | 05/08/2015 |
| Graphics | Xbox One GPU Compute Units (formerly Xbox One GPU Shader Cores) | Explains in detail how compute units (formerly shader cores) work, and includes updated hardware terminology. | Advanced Technology Group | 05/08/2015 |
| Graphics | Xbox One Dynamic Resolution | Covers the Xbox One hardware, APIs, and best practices for dynamically scaling a title’s resolution to achieve a smooth frame rate while handling variations in scene-rendering complexity. This technique is referred to as dynamic resolution. | Xbox One Graphics Team | 02/17/2015 |
| Graphics | Fast Semantics on Direct3D 11.x | Examines fast semantics as applied to a graphics context on Xbox One. Addresses the benefits provided by fast semantics, its application in Direct3D 11.x, and the process required to enable it. | Xbox One Graphics Team | 02/13/2015 |
| Graphics | Caches and Coherency on the Xbox One GPU | Examines the GPU as a pipeline and describes data coherency and synchronization in terms of moving through the pipeline. | Advanced Technology Group | 9/26/2014 |
| Graphics | Xbox One GPU Allocation Update | Describes various Xbox One GPU resource-allocation configurations, including their impact on exclusive and shared apps. | Advanced Technology Group | 06/05/2014 |
| Graphics | How Do VMEM Instructions Work? | Vector memory instructions transfer one or more pieces of data uniquely for each shader thread of a wavefront. This paper explains some of the details about how the vector memory class of shader instructions works in the Xbox One GPU. | Advanced Technology Group | 12/6/2013 |
| Graphics | Graphics Tuning Tips for Xbox One Launch Titles | Time is short. You need to ship your title, but you’re willing to tweak perf just a bit more. Our graphics experts have put together a quick list of tuning tips. | Advanced Technology Group | 09/23/2013 |
| Graphics | Command Lists, Draw Bundles, and Deferred Contexts | Command lists can be helpful when performing larger parallelizable rendering tasks, while draw bundles can perform smaller repetitive and reusable rendering tasks. This topic discusses the two techniques as ways of improving CPU rendering performance. | Advanced Technology Group | 09/03/2013 |
| Graphics | Multiple Experiences at Once: App Views and Focus States on Xbox One | Describes how Xbox One organizes multiple windows on the screen and how titles should handle the different window views and input states to enable the system’s multi-experience feature. | Advanced Technology Group | 08/20/2013 |
| Graphics | Xbox One GPU Memory Access: ONION, GARLIC, and more | Discusses the Xbox One GPU memory system, including the ONION and GARLIC buses, ESRAM, and the texture cache hierarchy. Also covers using PIX to profile memory traffic. | Advanced Technology Group | 08/20/2013 |
| Graphics | Xbox One Graphics Driver Architecture | Describes the status of the graphics driver for the exclusive OS in the July 2013 XDK, with particular emphasis on the changes that have evolved over the last six months. | Advanced Technology Group | 07/08/2013 |
| Graphics | Xbox One Shader Compiler | As the number of shaders and the length of individual shaders increase in next-generation games, the shader compiler is becoming a crucial system component. This white paper provides an overview of the Xbox One shader compiler. | Advanced Technology Group | 4/22/2013 |
| Graphics | Removing DirectX SDK Dependencies from Your Tool Chain | Important information to help developers migrate their tool chains from dependency on the DirectX SDK to Windows 8. | Advanced Technology Group | 08/01/2012 |