Technical Comparison Sony PS4 and Microsoft Xbox

[Hecatoncheires]

Sony has said nothing of cloud and it's not in their planning. Likely takes years of planning, coding etc. The reason gakai servers cant run game related code is because that's not what they do.

I doubt there are many Gakai servers anyway. Company was small.

How can you say something like that?

Sony dedicated a very important part of the PS4 press conference to GAIKAI: David Perry took the stage directly after Mark Cerny who introduced the new console. They announced this service as one of the major features of the new system ("every PS4 game will be on GAIKAI as a demo", "Virtual living-room: join your friends online via GAIKAI and kill hard bosses for them", and so forth.)

 

[ultragpu]

It will be interesting if PS4 has the exact same system reservation as Xbone (3GB/2cores)

Oh you so evil you , I read this thread too you know.

 

[upnorthsox]

gakai is completely completely different, it's a compressed frames being sent solution, it doesn't augment anything locally it's a "dumb" solution so to speak. besides they dont seem to have any clue what to do with gakai and all rumors are it was just for backwards compatibility (but that must not be going well since they've gone dark)

gakai probably doesn't even have very many servers, and it's certainly doubtful sony can afford more.

with ms now saying the cloud can help with actual graphics making the one 40x as powerful as 360, this is getting to be a possible big deal...

Yep, the business world equivolent for Gakai vs Cloud would be Citrix vs Web Apps.

 

[upnorthsox]

Yep.


I imagine Sony is reserving 10% or more of the GPU as well, likely more since they are typically less efficient as they reserved a lot more memory on PS3 for OS. I'd guess 15-20% PS4 GPU reserved for OS/apps.

I would imagine the opposite and Sony isn't reserving anything. PS4 may use 10% or more of the GPU but it can be on an as available basis.

MS because of the VM config has to either reserve resources for the OS VM and/or have listener jobs running on the Game VM. Most likely would be a reserve for the OS VM (otherwise it has no gpu resource at all). Without the VM config, I'd expect them to be just like Sony.

 

[BRiT]

I really don't know why everyone is getting so bent out of shape about this reservation considering the Xbox360 had the same reservation amount.

 

[babybumb]

I'm aware of all that. Xbox has cloud save too but that's eons of complexity away from what we're talking about.

Gakai I dunno whats up, but it's gone dark from Sony's side and I'm sure their resources are nothing compared to Azure. The speculation is it would be used only as PS2/PS3 backwards compatibility but even that seems stalled to me but I guess e3 would be the place to hear more about Gakai if we are going to.

For better or worse Gakai's technology is totally different than what MS is discussing, as you know. It sends a compressed non-interactive video stream out. It would have to replace the PS4, not augment it.

If you think the main use and why it was bought was backwards comp.. really.

Gaikai will be the whole Playstation platform. It will not be tied to single devices.

Anybody can buy server time right now from Amazon EC2 and do what MS is proposing even on a current gen title if it was so beneficial

 

[James Car]

And if comes down to money=server power, MS has a lot more money.

Yes but if money correlated to power we'd have more than 120mm2 dedicated to the gpu and something other than commodity ddr3.

 

[arijoytunir]

so multiplats will be limited by 5gb ram on ps4 due to xbox ?

what are the advantages of esram on xbox compared to ps4's gddr5?

 

[warb]

Yes but if money correlated to power we'd have more than 120mm2 dedicated to the gpu and something other than commodity ddr3.

If power was all important Nintendo would have been out of the game long ago, and we'd all be PC gamers.

There is enough about the new Xbox for it to compete/offer the same games, with just comparatively worse IQ.

 

[Grall]

I really don't know why everyone is getting so bent out of shape about this reservation considering the Xbox360 had the same reservation amount.

The 360 reserves 10% GPU cycles always for......what, exactly? Its OS never does *anything* with the GPU while a game is running, and when the system blade is opened up the game automatically pauses...or it did when I last used my 360 years ago, but I would think the same is true now as well, since how could you control both the blade menu and the game simultaneously with the same joypad...?

 

[warb]

so multiplats will be limited by 5gb ram on ps4 due to xbox ?

what are the advantages of esram on xbox compared to ps4's gddr5?

There are hints that PS4 will have the same amount reserved. The KZ slides and another guy with a dev kit. It would make sense to match at first, because Sony can't take more away later if they need to add features. They can release more to games later.

 

[Gradthrawn]

so multiplats will be limited by 5gb ram on ps4 due to xbox ?

Lets assume the resource reservations were different, which they don't appear to be at the moment. But if they were, then perhaps multiplats would be "limited to 5 GB" in the same way multiplats are limited to half a gig on the PC right now. Despite game engines being built around, or forced to accommodate, platforms with only a half gig of memory, we clearly see some very nice visual advantages for those same games when on an adequately equipped PC. There's little reason to expect differently moving forward. Particularly with the core architecture across all 3 major platforms being so similar now.

The 360 reserves 10% GPU cycles always for......what, exactly? Its OS never does *anything* with the GPU while a game is running, and when the system blade is opened up the game automatically pauses...or it did when I last used my 360 years ago, but I would think the same is true now as well, since how could you control both the blade menu and the game simultaneously with the same joypad...?

As ERP and others have pointed out, it does (or can) use the GPU while the game is running, for example the onscreen system notifications (new message download complete, etc).

 

[upnorthsox]

If power was all important Nintendo would have been out of the game long ago, and we'd all be PC gamers.

There is enough about the new Xbox for it to compete/offer the same games, with just comparatively worse IQ.

So the Xbox One will be the next Game Cube then?

 

[Rangers]

I really don't know why everyone is getting so bent out of shape about this reservation considering the Xbox360 had the same reservation amount.

too be clear 360 reserves 10% of GPU as well?

hmm i had no idea. does anyone know if ps3 does also?

If so then it's probably a normal thing and we can assume it will ding PS4 also even if we never hear anything about it.

Weird that I had never heard of it.

It's just Durango is kind of light on the power as is, really hate to give up anymore. -10% pushes it close to barely a teraflop.

i think of it compared to the 2009 hd 4890 in my pc all the time. the fact is it's probably barely more powerful (in raw flops it's less so, but i'm gonna give it a good amount of efficiency) which is kind of disconcerting. A 7770 would not be much of an upgrade from my 4890 that i've seen (although i think maybe in some games it flies ahead)

 

[Gradthrawn]

Weird that I had never heard of it.

No its not. We don't know nearly as much about these consoles, any of them, as we like to think, or claim, that we do. We get a few tidbits here and there from leaked information, or developer comments and form what we think to be a complete picture and thorough understanding of them without ever having even sat down in front of a dev kit nor less written a single line of code.

No offense meant to anyone, including you or myself, with that comment by the way.

 

[James Car]

So the Xbox One will be the next Game Cube then?

If going by silicone budget it would appear so ...

Gamecube:
CPU 43mm2
GPU 110mm2

 

[astrograd]

How can you say something like that?

Sony dedicated a very important part of the PS4 press conference to GAIKAI: David Perry took the stage directly after Mark Cerny who introduced the new console. They announced this service as one of the major features of the new system ("every PS4 game will be on GAIKAI as a demo", "Virtual living-room: join your friends online via GAIKAI and kill hard bosses for them", and so forth.)

They also came out afterwards and said that was all just aspirational stuff that they hope they can do someday down the road. :/

 

[yewyew]

Yep.


I imagine Sony is reserving 10% or more of the GPU as well, likely more since they are typically less efficient as they reserved a lot more memory on PS3 for OS. I'd guess 15-20% PS4 GPU reserved for OS/apps.

Then maybe that would explain the additional graphics pipeline and compute queues in the leaks...

 

[astrograd]

If the entire thing was designed with a 800mhz GPU and 1.6Ghz CPU in mind doesn't that mean that the thermals and also power supply (higher clock is probably going to need a higher voltage) is going to need to redone?. This isn't something that they can change over night they will really need to test it thoroughly do they have time to do so?.

Not planning on wading too much into your guys' convo here but I can tell you from experience that engineering projects ALWAYS have wiggle room designed in specifically for this sort of thing. Especially projects that are competitive in nature and in areas of such projects that can be modified late in the game (like clocks).

 

[ShadowRunner]

with ms now saying the cloud can help with actual graphics making the one 40x as powerful as 360, this is getting to be a possible big deal...

More likely is that its mostly marketing BS. Has everyone lost their marbles

There may be some useful use cases of cloud computing but saying its going to make a console X times more powerful is just rubbish.