Nothing can stop the next-gen hype train now that Microsoft and Sony have both unveiled their new home consoles. Sony showed off its PlayStation 4 in February, and Microsoft did the same yesterday with its Xbox One. We now know the basic...
Nothing can stop the next-gen hype train now that Microsoft and Sony have both unveiled their new home consoles. Sony showed off its PlayStation 4 in February, and Microsoft did the same yesterday with its Xbox One. We now know the basics about each device, and that gives us a chance to look at each system to decide which one is best prepared to win over gamers’ hearts this holiday and beyond. First, let’s get some basics out of the way. We don’t know the price. We barely know about the games. Each company, and their partners, will certainly show more at the Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show in early June. Until then, we’re simply working from the visions that Microsoft and Sony attempted to establish with their announcements. Analyst Jesse Divinch, the vice president of insights at industry-analysis firm EEDAR, thinks it’s too early to tell. “It’s always difficult to determine winners and losers off of highly choreographed presentations, but from other experiences, it is too close of a call to say one presentation was better than the other,” said Divinch. “From EEDAR’s view point, both were successful in demonstrating their platform’s core experience, and we believe that both Microsoft and Sony will realize market success at launch and through 2017. It’s too early to predict who will have a larger market share, but we are confident in saying that both will be profitable and viable platforms for third-party developers.” Let’s look at the facts and then you can decide. Hardware separated at birth Microsoft has already lifted the curtain on the design for its new box. The PlayStation 4′s aesthetics are still under wraps. That doesn’t really matter, because gamers know that true beauty comes from within. When it comes to internals, these two consoles are nearly identical. That’s because both are using the same AMD Jaguar accelerated processing unit that combines the computational and the graphical processing on to a single, streamlined chip. The Xbox One collection. Both systems have eight cores running at around 1.6GHz, with 4MB of L2 cache. Things don’t diverge significantly until we look at the system memory. Again, both systems have 8GB of RAM, but the PS4 uses the speedier GDDR5 memory that can stream data at 5,500MHz, while Xbox One’s DDR3 RAM tops out at 2,133MHz. That translates into a huge difference in the amount of memory each system can move at any one time. That gives the PlayStation 4 a clear edge in raw computing power – but it’s not as simple as that. Microsoft specifically designed Xbox One to offload computation into the fabled cloud. “There are a growing number of transistors in the cloud that you can move the [computational] loads onto,” Microsoft software expert Boyd Multerer said in during an Xbox One panel. “I think it’s an inflection point. So — over time — your box gets more powerful. We move loads into the cloud to free up resources on the box.” The idea is that Microsoft will continually get better at handling certain kinds of computations (artificial intelligence, for example) on its servers. This will open up One’s local hardware so it can process more detailed visuals and other kinds of data. That’s the plan, anyhow. It is up to game developers to follow through with that. Meanwhile, Sony’s Gaikai cloud service might be able to do the same thing, but it looks like it is attempting to unload entire game demos into the cloud rather than piecemeal portions each title. In the end, these two machines are a pair of powerful PC-based gaming rigs that should produce high-quality graphics. Gaming or multimedia features If PlayStation 4 is a slightly more powerful Xbox One — or Xbox One is a slightly slower PlayStation 4 — then what separates these devices? The answer to that question is features: software, social capabilities, and
