Xbox One April System Update Goes On Early Preview As Microsoft Talks A Bit On DirectX 12

With a week still to go before March ends, Microsoft has already advanced its next update, the Xbox One April System Update to early adopters to preview and test. This is because next month’s update will come in two waves.

The first wave, detailed by Major Nelson via his blog, will come with three main features and improvements. Some party chat features will be improved, including the Party App, which to help your mic be enabled and the aid in sorting out privacy settings or networking issues that may be blocking communication with other party members.

Game hub links will also be improved. Activity feed items can now be seen through friends. The game hubs link has also been added to the game’s page in the achievements app. Finally, when earning an achievement, players can now see the description of the achievement even without opening the app. The preview is already out and available for download.

The updates for the Xbox One have been rolling out left and right. But it appears that not everyone is still completely convinced of the change that management has effected on the console. Gamingbolt reports that Spencer has recently commented on talk about how Microsoft may have lied about the effects of the DirectX 12 on the Xbox One. Responding via his official Twitter page, Xbox head Phil Spencer dispelled this notion.

“We haven’t lied about DX12 on XB1. Speed increase over DX11 depends on how your code works,” said Spencer as quoted by Gamingbolt.

This controversy has been spurred by a recent report from Gamepur, which discussed an interview with Stardock’s Brad Wardell. According to the report, what DirectX 12 and its other counterparts, Vulkan and Mantle, will be bringing is the ability for the hardware’s cores to talk to each other, instead of just one single CPU doing the work. This means that nothing has changed in terms of what is actually in the device itself.

Citing the numbers, Wardell stated that the computer speed is still at 3GHz for a single core. While the DirectX 12 will have some benefits on the Xbox One and PC, that also means that it has previous devices that have had multi-core were still running on single core capability.

The report now pushes for the fact that even with all of the supposed new parts coming in, it still contains the same speed and core quantity, but will only function differently thanks to the new kind of communication between among the cores. The issue can be addressed once Microsoft presents players with new Xbox One games that feature the DirectX 12’s benefits in action.

Xbox One March System Update (Credit: YouTube/GamesHQMedia)

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