Technical Comparison Sony PS4 and Microsoft Xbox

Digital Foundry has a comparison with a convincing argument - Sony made a gamble that paid off. MS committed to 8GBs early on which seemed cost prohibitive, so had to go with local storage again. Sony chose GDDR5 and was looking at 4 GBs, but was able to stretch to 8GBs for long-term advantage. Had MS picked GDDR5 and expected 8 GBs to be cost effective, it'd be a different story.

We really need to know what the advantages of ESRAM are. It seems very wasteful at the moment to go with that over eDRAM. A local store to make up the BW deficit of DDR3 is one thing, but committing 2 billion transistors to the task instead of 300,000 seems a major decision. Of course there's the foundry issue to factor in. We can't be sure which is the greater influence - better performance or better economies of production.

 

Bottom line is:

MS made a jack of all trades box, hence the Name XBOX ONE.

Sony made a box to push games 1st and foremost.

That's why I think MS's budget for graphics and the way it's system is built, would never 1up Sony's PS4. If they did it'd be freaking expensive and MS is clearly targeting mass market over core gamers.

 

Thanks for anadtech article. Been long time before I went to that site I just had a glance to his article. I thought he was kinda defending Microsoft approach. Since vgleaks were pretty much right about the specs. I think it is fair to post TImothy Lottes opnion as well

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=510076

 

From the comments:

So basically Microsoft build an expensive Google TV, which also can do games ?

 

I don't understand why people say that Xbox One is jack of all trades, and PS4 is not. Xbox One could have matched PS4 specs and still do what it does. Other way around, PS4 is not limited by hardware for doing what Xbox One does.
Having said that, I find it mindboggling that a company that has been bleeding money for about a decade straight has bested Microsoft in the hardware department. There is no excuse. However, mad respect to Sony for not lifting the gas pedal on the PS4.

 

Thing is, it's impossible to talk about these boxes without talking about pricing, either how much they will sell for our how much money each company is willing to lose. If the Xbox One is $449 and the PS4 is $599, we have a completely different narrative.

 

Especially given with services like Netflix and other streaming services who even needs cable.
We only have cable because we need it for the provider to give us access to internet.

 

Fascinating post on Neogaf.

Can it be that this story on three OS's is complete BS ?

In other words:

- Xbox One runs Windows 8
- Games run in a VM under Windows 8

Depends on how you see a VM. On my PC, it's just a program virtualizing my PC. You can still put the video of the UI, the game and external video side by side.

What's interesting, is that it allows Microsoft to change the HW in due time. Games run in a VM and talk to the HW via an abstraction layer.

What wonders me (didn't see it discussed anywhere) what's the performance penalty ? To me, it seems like the Xbox One will be the real boot anchor for cross platform games.

 

Honestly, we don't. The PS3 has been selling at a faster rate than Xbox 360 since launch (meaning PS3 sold faster in its first year than 360 did in its first year). PS4 has brand recognition ánd now they have significantly better specs. I expect PS4 to outsell Xbox One at least 2:1 in Europe and 10:1 in Japan.

 

Seems like having a quiet and power efficient box for the living room was an important reason for MS choosing to go with a lesser GPU and DDR3. The easiest comparison between these two systems is basically you take two identical computers and you put a high-end GPU in one, and a mid-range GPU in the other (or mid-range and low-end if you want). Price and what the consumer feels is "good enough" will be big. Comparisons in terms of tech seems to be pretty straight-forward since they're pretty much identical from an architecture standpoint, the Xbox One just being a reduced version of the other.

The only variables on the Xbox One's ESRAM, and whether it is a scratchpad or a cache. Also, they kept mentioning 200 GB/s of system bandwidth. Whether that is creative math or a suggestion that the GPU has been overclocked to about 1 GHz (which would get them to 200 GB/s between ESRAM and DDR3 bandwidth to GPU) is up in the air. I'd lean towards creative math. Either way, the comparison of high-end to mid-range is still valid. That would just make the gap a bit smaller. PS4 also has those compute queue customizations and some other tweaks.

In terms of tech, I think we're going to be lacking the radical architecture discussions of last gen, since multiplatform games are not going to have to reinvent the wheel moving from one console to the other.

 

Exactly. I'm under the impression that even the US is moving away from cable to on demand streaming services, on any device.

On another note, most of the Xbox Ones features are build in to modern TV's. Modern TV's ship with a webcam, SmartApps ranging from Skype to Facebook, have internet acces and run on Android, providing a gaming library fit for the casual user.

 

No. It runs 3 OSs. One for the Hypervisor (a lightweight version of Microsoft Hyper-V server), one for the system(Windows kernel-based) and one for the game (light-weight like the OS that runs while you game on PS360). Performance penalty for virtualiziation is now supposedly very small. They've also streamlined the virtualization environment because they know exactly which OSs are going to run and in which configuration.

Also, the GPU is GCN with the PRT feature from the high-end GCN GPUs.

 

Question is was did Sony's swap to GDDR5 come for free? What was the premium over GDDR3?

 

I'm curious which one has a better security model against being hacked.

 

How is this mindboggling? Overall, the PS3 is clearly going to be a net loss for Sony. Microsoft has no desire to get into a pissing match with specs, since it has never been the reason why a console is successful, but it's clear when it's been a failure: N64 vs. PSOne, Xbox vs. PS2, first years of the PS3, poor sales of the Vita, etc... Gamers consistently buy a system for one reason and one reason only, games.

Again, if the PS4 ends up costing $100 more or Sony takes a significantly higher loss, it's not going to be pretty.

 

The PS4 was always going to have GDDR5 memory. The amount has always been in flux, with it starting at as little as 2GB. Microsoft was always aiming for 8GB, thus relied on the readily available DDR3 standard. Eurogamer explains it pretty well: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-spec-analysis-xbox-one

 

Specs have never won a console generation.

 

Yes, looking at the numbers, it seems that the 6T-SRAM is a huge waste of transistors and die area compared to just using faster system memory, eDRAM or 1T-SRAM.
I thought 6T-SRAM could be clocked really high, resulting in a huge bandwidth. But it seems to provide almost half as much bandwidth as a 256-bit GDDR5 implementation.

We'll have to wait for developer opinions after working on both platforms to know exactly how this will turn out.

 

True, but I thinks that never before have specs been this important. Besides, the console with the better specs failed in the past due to lesser software support. Sony now has better hardware ánd they have very talented first party studios that can get most out of it. I squeel of happiness by the thought Naughty Dog and Santa Monica with PS4.

 

So you're telling me its all about the games? Interesting...