14 DAY TRIAL // The PlayStation 4 is considerably faster than the Xbox One in terms of RAM and GPU performance, at least according to a new report that summarizes statements from various developers of games for the two next-gen consoles.
The PlayStation 4 and Xbox 360 are set to make their debut this November in North America and Europe, and the next-gen console war is fully underway, mostly through statements concerning power and the number of available units.
After hearing earlier this week a developer claim a nearly 50% difference in power in favor of the PS4 over the Xbox One, Edge magazine has formed a new report based on statements from anonymous developers.
According to them, the PS4 is, in fact, much more powerful than the Xbox one in terms of certain things, like the read speed of its RAM or the overall speed of the GPU's ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit).
In order to properly illustrate this difference in performance, one developer gave an example about an unoptimized title that can run at 30 frames-per-second at 1920x1080 Full HD resolution on the PS4 but can only manage around 20-something FPS at 1600x900 resolution on the Xbox One.
What's more, the 32MB of ESRAM that Microsoft believes will help developers is actually "a pain to use," according to one studio.
The recent overclock made to the Xbox One's CPU was also a poor choice, according to developers, as it won't make that big of a difference against the PS4 but "something is better than nothing."
Another area where the Xbox One is lagging behind is in terms of graphics drivers as Microsoft has always been late with supplying dev-kit editions of the next-gen console with up to date software, as opposed to Sony.
There are some areas where the Xbox One is better than the PS4, as one developer offered an example where a game could run better on Microsoft's device.
"Let’s say you are using procedural generation or raytracing via parametric surfaces – that is, using a lot of memory writes and not much texturing or ALU – Xbox One will be likely be faster," he said.
While the developers of launch-day and launch-window games for the PS4 and Xbox One are striving to achieve parity between their different builds, these differences will become more apparent as more games start appearing for the two devices.