You know, I guess all that talk of "super-charged pc architecture" on Sony's side really seems to be just that. While on the other hand MS's talk about "balanced hardware" and whatnot, in the light of recent events, sounds more and more like plain PR after all. I'm not trying to make a fanboy argument here and bash MS (since it seems they're doing a pretty damn good job of doing it themselves
). If anything I'm more of an MS "believer" if you will. However, they got people like Penello posting on that-other-forum that they "won't give up a 30%+ performance difference to Sony", "They invented DirectX", etc. At E3 they had presentations that were all about 1080p/60fps for CoD and BF4. And now? It all just seems really unflattering and outright stupid after what we know now.
In fact, it seems the super-charged PC architecture results in easier porting from PC to PS4, because basically the PS4 is "just" (not in a negative way) a beefed-up PC. You've got a single large pool of high bandwidth RAM that works just as good for high performance graphics applications as it most probably also does for standard OS- and application-stuff. We also have to consider that those anonymous sources that stated that "PS4 ports run at 1080p, 90fps, unoptimized" while "X1 ports run at 900p, 20-30fps" probably were true or not far from reality after all. And coming to think of it, it does actually make a lot of sense. There just isn't as much need to optimize with PS4 because the system's architecture is straight forward and doesn't require special treatment to run good. This wasn't the case in the last generation with 360 and even more so with PS3's Cell and it looks like it still isn't the case with X1. And I think that last part is where the problem lies for MS, at least for now.
It certainly was clear to many, given the X1's leaked documents, that the system will have bottlenecks due to the usage of DDR3 and the specialized ESRAM. I guess it just wasn't as clear how simple and straight-forward the PS4 is compared to that.
However, it's still hard to comprehend how an unspectacular game as CoD Ghosts, isn't able to achieve anything above 720p/60 on X1. The game is based on idTech 3, although highly adapted and enhanced, as far as I know it's no deferred shader engine, so there shouldn't be any problem with fitting the framebuffer into the ESRAM (of course, then the problem is still with getting the texture data into the framebuffer which is probably bound by the DDR3 bandwidth). It's also strange when you compare it to something like Forza 5 which is a forward renderer as well that is however capable of reaching 1080p/60 with certainly good fidelity. Of course the games are quite different but still, there are some similarities and I guess that there just wasn't enough time to optimize for the requirements of the X1.
I think that the devs will learn to cope with X1's architecture over the next year and that should allow for the gap to close to some degree, at least for multiplats, because looking at first party titles the gap isn't that big to begin with. However, there is no denying that apart from closing the gap as good as possible will not suddenly make the X1 a more powerful system, because at some point the pure spec differences will still prevent parity (graphics- and computewise).
The big takeaway from this is probably not that the X1 requires a certain amount of optimization to shine, but probably that the PS4 simply does not.