PS4 vs Xbox One vs The PC: Simulated Benchmarks Reveal Comparative Performance

Seeing actual benchmarks of the PS4 against the Xbox One will never happen since they both different operating systems and the benchmarks to test performance on those different operating systems does not exist. Trying to compare those consoles to the PC is an even harder task. However, there is at least partial closure for people wanting to know what would win: the Xbox One, PS4 or a gaming PC. Some simulated benchmarks have emerged which propose to figure out which is faster. Unsurprisingly, we encourage cautions to be taken with these simulated benchmarks for a number of reasons: issues with drivers, operating system overhead and non-linear responses of games to clock speed changes and shader core increases. Oh, and of course: they are simulated not real. That isn’t to say that they aren’t logically sound: but they are probably within 10-20% margin of error of the actual real world performance.

As the graphs suggest Sony’s PS4 is significantly more powerful than Microsoft’s Xbox One. Of course to understand what that actually means we need to compare it to some desktop graphics cards for scale. Sony’s PS4 roughly lines up with AMD’s HD 7850/R7 265. If we take into consideration that the PS4 uses a fairly feeble CPU, we can probably assume that a HD 7850 on a desktop gaming PC would perform better with something like an Intel Pentium Anniversary Edition CPU where there is minimal CPU bottleneck. Microsoft’s Xbox One on the other hand performs about 40% slower than the same HD 7850, making it loosely equivalent to a HD 7770 or R7 250X.  The overall trend here is not surprising: Microsoft’s Xbox One is very underpowered compared to the PS4 and even if Microsoft can work miracles with API optimisations and other nifty tricks there’s no way to close such a significant gap. This is part of the reason why we have seen a lot of console developers bring games to the PS4 at higher resolution and texture quality than the Xbox One equivalents, like Call of Duty: Ghosts and Metal Gear Solid 5.

Source: WCCFTech

Images courtesy of WCCFTech