Technical Comparison Sony PS4 and Microsoft Xbox

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Serious question/looking for comments - in terms of visuals, have you been impressed with what you have seen so far? What are some of the best examples of the new power on either platform that you saw this week?

Personally I was pretty impressed with some off the destruction to environments in Infamous and the over scale of what appears to be a fairly open ended world. I'm a little disappointed with the overall animation across all games, still have some jerky movements with NPCs that hopefully can cleaned up. Overall the texture work across both platforms seems pretty impressive and the LOD is greatly improved over 360/PS3.

Finally for all the talk I'm not seeing much in terms of software which demonstrates the additional power that the PS4 is rumored to have over XB1. So is it there? Are developers still coming to terms with the hardware? Is this is due to development tools lacking maturity? Did Sony waste silicon on CUs and ROP which can't be accessed due to bandwidth and CPU limits?

I would wait for second gen games before judging their work.

The developers have a lot of things to learn and setup for launch titles.
 
Serious question/looking for comments - in terms of visuals, have you been impressed with what you have seen so far? What are some of the best examples of the new power on either platform that you saw this week?

Personally I was pretty impressed with some off the destruction to environments in Infamous and the over scale of what appears to be a fairly open ended world. I'm a little disappointed with the overall animation across all games, still have some jerky movements with NPCs that hopefully can cleaned up. Overall the texture work across both platforms seems pretty impressive and the LOD is greatly improved over 360/PS3.

Finally for all the talk I'm not seeing much in terms of software which demonstrates the additional power that the PS4 is rumored to have over XB1. So is it there? Are developers still coming to terms with the hardware? Is this is due to development tools lacking maturity? Did Sony waste silicon on CUs and ROP which can't be accessed due to bandwidth and CPU limits?

These are silly questions when there is a war going on.... :LOL:
 
The xbox one has heat pipes


so it does have liquid cooling.

I believe that isn't liquid cooling, those are Rods made of copper to absorb heat.
cool_AMD_Phenom_Black_edition_heatsink_fan.jpg

phenom_790FX-DS5_2.jpg


I'm just now thinking, I may have to debunk the idea of sony using liquid cooling. it's far too expensive and risky to mas produce; which is probably why neither Microsoft or sony has touched it in the past.

Anyways, In that picture of the xbox one's internal perspective, it seems spacious enough to have parts refitted to take place, if requested. the box's dimensions are actually big enough to have the latest laptop tech inside.

the other idea i have is that Sony's PS4 might not be hard clocked at 1.8Tflops.
 
I believe that isn't liquid cooling, those are Rods made of copper to absorb heat.

Those are heat pipes:

A heat pipe or heat pin is a heat-transfer device that combines the principles of both thermal conductivity and phase transition to efficiently manage the transfer of heat between two solid interfaces. The idea of heat pipes was first suggested by R.S.Gaugler in 1942. However, it was not until 1962, when G.M.Grover invented it, that its remarkable properties were appreciated and serious development began.

At the hot interface within a heat pipe, which is typically at a very low pressure, a liquid in contact with a thermally conductive solid surface turns into a vapor by absorbing heat from that surface. The vapor then travels along the heat pipe to the cold interface, condenses back into a liquid, releasing the latent heat. The liquid then returns to the hot interface through either capillary action or gravity action where it evaporates once more and repeats the cycle. In addition, the internal pressure of the heat pipe can be set or adjusted to facilitate the phase change depending on the demands of the working conditions of the thermally managed system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pipe
 
Six months before a platform launch I think we can safely say both. How can either be mature at this stage?

Of course the fact they are x86 / radeon based makes accessing a good amount of there power relatively easy, but like any platform it takes years to master the best ways to tap all there power.
 
Serious question/looking for comments - in terms of visuals, have you been impressed with what you have seen so far? What are some of the best examples of the new power on either platform that you saw this week?

Personally I was pretty impressed with some off the destruction to environments in Infamous and the over scale of what appears to be a fairly open ended world. I'm a little disappointed with the overall animation across all games, still have some jerky movements with NPCs that hopefully can cleaned up. Overall the texture work across both platforms seems pretty impressive and the LOD is greatly improved over 360/PS3.

Finally for all the talk I'm not seeing much in terms of software which demonstrates the additional power that the PS4 is rumored to have over XB1. So is it there? Are developers still coming to terms with the hardware? Is this is due to development tools lacking maturity? Did Sony waste silicon on CUs and ROP which can't be accessed due to bandwidth and CPU limits?

Maybe we'll see it later on?

Multiplatforms at least should show something, if just running a bit better.

Diminishing returns might be a problem too (and I hate that). Some of Wii U stuff doesn't look so far away. It really takes something like a ultra realistic military shooter to demonstrate power anymore.

I'd say it could be the ESRAM, and it could, but no devs are saying that. Plus, these games would seem to be too early for such advanced techniques, and probably were mostly deved on kits without ESRAM anyway.

As I told proelite, who even knows whats in Xbone anyway? All that's confirmed is 5 billion transistors :p

I dont actually believe in special sauce (apart from perhaps ESRAM), but wild goose chases are fun to believe in sometimes.
 
Six months before a platform launch I think we can safely say both. How can either be mature at this stage?

The rumors at this point are XB1 tools are behind and that the hardware is less powerful, I would have expected the machine with more power and tools that are more mature to be able to showcase that.

I am beginning to wonder if some of the conventional wisdom regarding XB1's graphic capability are due to a misunderstanding or missing info about how the architecture actually works.
 
We will find out in nov how much it will better. Right now games are running on dev kits.... aka a pc.

Df articles will be amazing.
 
Well , Peter Moore said they haven't final kits yet .... who knows ...


Maybe we'll see it later on?
Diminishing returns might be a problem too (and I hate that). Some of Wii U stuff doesn't look so far away.

What do you mean ? Some WiiU titles looks nice , but that's it . There's a huge difference from the PS4/XBone .... they're going to feel the heat from now on .
 
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We will find out in nov how much it will better. Right now games are running on dev kits.... aka a pc.

Df articles will be amazing.

No idea what MS devkits are at this point, nor how broadly available they are, but Sony devkits are pretty much retail units with a couple of different ports on them and in a different box. MS ought to be in a similar position by now.

I was told before E3 that a lot of publishers would be showing PC versions of games, because that's where the bulk of development has happened for most of these titles. I wouldn't assume just because something is showing a console controller, that it's running on a console.

The graphics on both platforms have been about what I'd expect, the biggest difference I've noticed is in the animation. That's been considerably better across the board, in bone counts, overall fidelity and quantity.

I think the biggest short term winner from the console releases will be PC games, not least of which because it's now likely that the same teams will do the PC version instead of handing it off to some cut price port house.
 
Well , Peter Moore said they haven't final kits yet .... who knows ...




What do you mean ? Some WiiU titles looks nice , but that's it . There's a huge difference from the RS4/XBone .... they're going to feel the heat from now on .

I agree Wii U is doomed and all, I'm just saying I dont look at Mario 3D World, Mario Kart U, X, That Donkey Kong game, Wind Waker remake, and think "those look terrible". A lot of it is just the cartoony style of the games, and operating in 720P will help them too.

I guess you could sort of say the same thing about a lot of Wii games last gen. The Mario games looked good, compared to ps360 you didn't want to vomit, but then Conduit (an FPS) looked horrible.

If you tried to port BF4 to Wii U you'd see the difference hugely, but Mario 3D world looks good...
 
Yep, the XB1 beta kits have all the extra componentry in them (SHAPE, move engines etc).

I'm not seeing the supposed PS4's technical advantage in the demos showed so far. I think it will be a repeat of current gen...ie PS3 more powerful on paper...in practice doesn't really show.

There will certainly be differences in multiplat titles, DF might be needed to point them out to people, but they will be there.

More interesting is now that we know 2 cores are reserved on PS4 as well, XB1 might in practice have more available CPU resources than PS4 since SHAPE can theoretically handle audio entirely leaving the CPU to do other stuff.

I wonder how that will translate to games, maybe PS4 will just use more GPU compute to compensate.
 
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Those are heat pipes:

A heat pipe or heat pin is a heat-transfer device that combines the principles of both thermal conductivity and phase transition to efficiently manage the transfer of heat between two solid interfaces. The idea of heat pipes was first suggested by R.S.Gaugler in 1942. However, it was not until 1962, when G.M.Grover invented it, that its remarkable properties were appreciated and serious development began.

At the hot interface within a heat pipe, which is typically at a very low pressure, a liquid in contact with a thermally conductive solid surface turns into a vapor by absorbing heat from that surface. The vapor then travels along the heat pipe to the cold interface, condenses back into a liquid, releasing the latent heat. The liquid then returns to the hot interface through either capillary action or gravity action where it evaporates once more and repeats the cycle. In addition, the internal pressure of the heat pipe can be set or adjusted to facilitate the phase change depending on the demands of the working conditions of the thermally managed system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pipe

seems compelling, i don't know if true. my PC uses one and i see no places of where water enters. it could be a different model, but if the xbox one is using a water cooler then that leaves even more opportunity for increasing the processing power.


----------------------

Sam Lake from Remedy confirms Quantum Brake is "In game" and gets into detail. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rly8s1ZkkL4

updated with pictures. http://gamersyde.com/news_e3_some_quantum_break_images-14200_en.html

i1wgnm.jpg

rkre3t.jpg

I have to say, If RYSE and Quantum Brake are confirmed in game then that does distort our perception of Xone's abilities. maybe Microsoft is keeping quite on bumped up tech or maybe cloud usage has evolved.
 
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Anyone see that both consoles are hdmi out only?

And the ps4 camera will retail for the same price as the controller, $60?

Earbud based headset out of the box for ps4?

Engadget lists the xb1 gpu at 500 mhz.
 
Yep, the XB1 beta kits have all the extra componentry in them (SHAPE, move engines etc).



There will certainly be differences in multiplat titles, DF might be needed to point them out to people, but they will be there.

Assuming ESRAM isn't a boost and it's straight flop vs flop :p

More interesting is now that we know 2 cores are reserved on PS4 as well, XB1 might in practice have more available CPU resources than PS4 since SHAPE can theoretically handle audio entirely leaving the CPU to do other stuff.

I wonder how that will translate to games, maybe PS4 will just use more GPU compute to compensate.

yeah possible, but shouldn't make huge difference i assume.

i look at like the platforms, the foundations are the same, 8gb ram (regardless of idiosyncrasies) and 8 core cpu (the same cpu) on both.

so one would only have a weaker gpu, the differences might not be profound. the difference is in only one competent/aspect. The foundations are the same, the window dressing may vary.

another thing i like to do is take it to last gen and translate the relative differences to get a feel...in that case the flops difference is like xenos at 333mhz vs xenos at 500mhz (66% ratio). how would that have affected things?

or if xbone had the same 18 Cu's as ps4, it's gpu would be clocked at 528 mhz instead of 800.
 
ESRAM is simply a cheaper solution for designing a game console with 8GB of memory compared to paying for GDDR5 - it's not special sauce.

that's where we disagree, there are many posts on this board indicating it could possibly act as a special sauce. the issue is the degree...will it make a trivial difference or a significant one?

It's a 32MB cache sitting on the GPU...


i could be wrong but i think if it was for just bw, you'd put the frame buffer in it like with xenos, but ms doesn't recommend that, they recommend the fb in ddr3. also, the read/write capabilities indicate more than a dumb bw saver, if i'm right.

you'd have to be hands on with the hardware and a programmer to actually know.

but it's odd to say the least ms/devs have not talked about it/pimped it.

i agree at first blush it was to deal with bandwidth (yet, 12cu discrete gpu's are ~70 gb/s only..). i dont know if ms thought it could improve performance too, or if that was a welcome, unexpected side effect, or if it isn't even the case at all.
 
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