The Glade 4.0

In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first. - George Carlin

PS4 will be the best graphically and include Sony service.

Having seen the specs, I'm really not sure why people think this. At best, it's a good 6 months too soon to call this. More likely, it's about a year too soon to call it definitively and generally. If you're going to prognosticate, you've certainly come down on a very.. strange side of the specs with your prediction.

From Microsoft’s mouth, we know that the Xbox One (formerly known as the Xbox 720) has an 8-core AMD CPU with 8GB of DDR3 RAM, a 500GB hard drive, HDMI in/out, USB 3.0, and Gigabit Ethernet. For more detailed specs, we must look towards the latest info from the games development sector, which has been programming Xbox One games since last year and thus has intimate knowledge of the hardware. The latest leaks suggest that the Xbox One will have an 8-core 64-bit x86 Jaguar AMD CPU @ 1.6GHz, coupled with a GPU that’s very close to the Radeon HD 7790. The Xbox One will have 68GB/sec of bandwidth between the CPU/GPU and RAM, the GPU will have 102GB/s of bandwidth to a local 32MB SRAM cache, and another 30GB/s of bandwidth to gamepads, Kinect, and other peripherals.

The PS4, in comparison, has an 8-core Jaguar AMD CPU, with a GPU that’s around the same level as the Radeon 7870 (which is significantly more powerful than the 7790). The PS4 has 8GB of GDDR5 RAM, providing 176GB/s of bandwidth to both the CPU and GPU. The Xbox One mostly ameliorates this difference with 32MB of high-speed SRAM on the GPU, but it will be a more complex architecture to take advantage of.

In both consoles, the CPU and GPU will be on the same die (an AMD APU). Just as the PS4 has 8GB of high-speed memory that is shared by the CPU and GPU, the Xbox One, by virtue of being based on the same APU heterogeneous system architecture (HSA), will probably be the same. In short, while there are small hardware differences between the consoles, they will ultimately have very similar performance characteristics. The PS4, with its one, big block of fast RAM, and bigger GPU, probably has the edge.

In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first. - George Carlin

Realistically, we wouldn’t be surprised if games on the Xbox 720 and PS4, just like the current generation, look very similar.

HDTV resolutions at 60fps aren't bottlenecking modern games, in my experience. CPUs are. I don't think I've seen the clock rate the PS4's running, but I think it's safe to say it's probably the same (or lower, unless they've got some cooling wizards to offset the higher power of the beefier GPU on-chip). When we're talking CPU bottlenecks, CPUs' RAM access isn't bandwidth limited, so I don't expect the GDDR5 to matter.

If we were talking about 3d gaming on HDTVs, or gaming on 4k resolutions, that article's probably right. But I suspect the guys who wrote it are thinking with their PC hats on, and aren't really thinking about the living room environment's limitations that consoles are built for.


Like I said, it's at least a year too early to consider this an answered question.

In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first. - George Carlin

It wasn't mentioned during the announcement, but after the event Sony Worldwide Studios President Shuhei Yoshida confirmed that the PS4 would support 4K resolutions - but only for video playback. This isn't a surprise, as playing 4K video isn't taxing for a next-gen console and HDMI 1.4 supports the resolution required – up to 4,096×2,160p at 24 Hz - the same as in digital cinemas. The big question is then how such content would be supplied?

In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first. - George Carlin

In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first. - George Carlin

The “AMD Radeon” GPU in the PS4 & Xbox One are not equal. The GDDR5 isn’t the only big difference despite popular belief.

PS4:
AMD Radeon GCN 1.x GPU (on APU)
18 Compute Units / 1152 GCN Cores
32 ROPS (Fillrate)
8 ACES * 8 Compute Queues = 64 Compute Queues

Xbox One:
AMD Radeon GCN 1.x GPU (on APU)
12 Compute Units / 768 GCN Cores
16 ROPS (Fillrate)
2 ACES * 2 Compute Queues = 4 Compute Queues

The PS4 has 50% more raw shader performance, a 100% increase in fillrate and a 700% increase in compute (gpgpu) queue granularity.
This isn’t negligible and just because they share the same system architecture doesn’t mean they’re equal. The PS4′s gpu holds a performance advantage of around 50% before you even take into account compute capabilities and the rest.

Facism is not a school of thought, it is a racial slur.

Facism is not a school of thought, it is a racial slur.

So, I've been largely disinterested in gaming for a few years now, but have been slowly getting back into them. One of the things I have been toying with is the idea of purchasing all big three consoles: WiiU, PS4, and XBone.

Is anyone else considering a similar route? What are the pros and cons? Do you feel multiple consoles are even necessary for the best gaming experience?

I just stick with my PC, there are VERY few console exclusives that I care for, and with the architecture change of the next gen consoles, the likeliness of PC versions is even higher >_>

Sony will use the PS4 as a platform to push a new video standard