The Xbox One GPU boost was recently announced by Microsoft, but how does that stack up against the PlayStation 4 hardware?
As previously reported by The Inquisitr, the Xbox One will support gameplay capture devices . Microsoft also announced the Xbox One is compatible with current headsets although it won’t be bundled with a headset, instead relying on the Kinect 2.0 for voice communications.
The Xbox One GPU boost is actually very modest, with the GPU cores being boosted from 800MHz to 853MHz. No word on whether the GPU or system memory will be boosted as well. Microsoft realized during the Xbox One beta testing phase that the Xbox One GPU could safely handle the higher speeds with no overheating or stability issues. Then again, Microsfot could be asking for another red ring of death fiasco for the Xbox One if they push the limits too much.
But what happens when you do a Xbox One and Playstation 4 hardware comparison? Both the Xbone and the PS4 share similar hardware from AMD. AMD claims Microsoft and Sony did not know they were both working with AMD on designing the next generation consoles. They both have a 8-core Jaguar CPU, an AMD GPU, 8 GB of memory, a 500GB HDD, Blu-ray drive, WiFi, 4K or Ultra HD HDMI, and USB 3.0.
A Xbox One and PlayStation 4 hardware comparison shows the main difference lies in the GPU and memory systems. The Xbox One has 768 GPU shader cores while the PS4 boasts 1152. As a comparison to the PC, the AMD Radeon HD 7990 has 4096 GPU shader cores, but that video card costs $1,000 alone.
Previously, the peak GPU shader throughput for the Xbox One was 1.25 TeraFLOPS/s versus the PlayStation 4’s 1.84 TeraFLOPS/s. The Xbox One GPU boost amounts to a 6.6 percent increase in performance, so the new theoretical Xbox GPU performance is about 1.33 TeraFLOPS/s.
A Sony PlayStation 4 FCC filing even revealed the PS4 CPU is faster than previously thought at 2.75 GHz while the Xbox One CPU is supposedly clocked at 1.6 GHz. The PlayStation 4’s GDDR memory speed is also significantly better than the Xbox One even though it employs a combination of high speed eSRAM and DDR3 memory.
Summarizing everything, a Xbox One, PlayStation 4 hardware comparison now shows the two consoles to be essentially separated by a gap of about two Wii U GPU’s (the Wii U GPU is rated for 0.352 TeraFLOPS/s). This significant GPU difference is enough of a performance gap that game developers will be forced to adjust graphics quality between the two consoles. In practice, this might mean lower resolution shadow maps and using FXAA instead of higher quality anti-aliasing methods.
But John Carmack doesn’t seem to worried. When talking about the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, John Carmack said they are both “very close” and “very good.” John Carmack is the id Software technical director responsible for Doom, Quake, and many other games. John Carmack says at this point he feels the two gaming consoles bring essentially the same capabilities to developers. And tests simulating the potential performance of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One only resulted in a 24 percent difference.
Do you think the Xbox One GPU boost is good enough compared to the PlayStation 4?