Microsoft were keeping quiet about the hardware of the Xbox One and it appears we now know why. According to speculation, coming from Heise.de the German technology magazine, the Xbox One has a significant weaker GPU part than the PlayStation 4.
First lets recap on the PlayStation 4 hardware. The PlayStation 4 uses an AMD APU which eight “Jaguar” 64 bit x86 cores clocked at a speed of 1.6GHz. This is combined with a GCN based GPU with 1156 stream processors, 32 ROPs and a 256 bit wide GDDR5 memory interface clocked at 5.5GHz with a memory bandwidth of 176GB/s. There is 8GB of shared system memory none of which is partitioned so the system or graphics can use as much as it needs.
Now onto the Xbox One hardware. The Xbox One uses the same AMD CPU component with eight “Jaguar” 64 bit x86 cores clocked at a speed of 1.6GHz. However, where it differs from the PlayStation 4 is on the GPU part. The Xbox One uses only 768 GCN Stream processors and it uses a quad channel DDR3 2133MHz memory interface which has bandwidth of 68.3GB/s. In addition there is 8GB of memory shared between the system and GPU parts in a similar way to the PlayStation 4 but with one key difference. The Xbox One uses a 32MB SRAM cache operating at 102GB/s with a greatly reduced latency over the PlayStation 4’s GDDR5. This cache helps bridge and cushion data transfers to the GPU in a faster way. Microsoft’s engineers have apparently been trying to pull this off as nearly 200GB/s of memory bandwidth by adding 102 to 68.3 but this is not a very plausible way of looking at it.
Furthermore the consoles both differ in terms of their software. The PlayStation 4 runs a Unix-derived operating system with the OpenGL 4.2 API. The Xbox One on the other hand uses a 64 bit Windows NT 6.X kernel-based operating system and the Direct X 11 API. From this it looks like the PS4 should be faster on the software side too as a Unix OS should be lighter to run than a Windows one, plus the OpenGL API will be great for maximising the performance of the AMD GPUs which are built for OpenGL these days.
So there you have it, the PlayStation 4 has a better GPU and stronger memory bandwidth. What are your thoughts on this?
Image Courtesy of Forbes
PS4 will still lose, the price will be crazy because its sony, already xbox has the majority of the market, so why would anyone move to a ps4 when they cant take there live account of friends with them
Let the PS4 release.. What’s the use of speculating before release?
you know that the 360 only sold 1 million more units worldwide and this is with it having a year head start
2012 end of year figures say 4.94 million different, but even with this figure the games sales for xbox are over 25% of that of ps3, working it retail, I can say that xbox out sell ps3 with ease, and more people are have a vested interest in there xbox live id over there ps3 profile, last year we ran 4 xbox tournaments but 0 ps3 as there was no interest in the ps3 ones, take from it what you will but I cant see people dropping there live ids to move to the ps4
ye i paid like 400f for 680 gtx when they came out. Now Haswell on target and thats 400g upgrade.
Xbox have lot to introduce as hardware spec don Mattick said they gave hardware spec just slightly to let other think Ps4 spec is faster than Xbox but They have lots of suprise left for E3 Ps4 will be doomed just wait and watch……
Sometimes spaces can be misleading compared to actual performance..
I could honestly care less which system has better specs. its still going to be a small enough difference that you can only notice it with a side-by-side comparison. the hardware specs isn’t what i buy my consoles for. if i want better graphics, ill use my PC.
I liked the 360 due to its social features. If i wanted to voice chat with a friend thats in a different game, I could.
I guess we all know now dont we . them weak specs has MS wondering how and what can we do to win people over now , I dont have a ps4 yet but my xbox one has been not so great with it’s problems so far . Im not happy with it .