UPDATED 16:33 EDT / SEPTEMBER 18 2013

NEWS

Game Developers Say PS4 is 50% Faster Than Xbox One

It has been less than two months since the world premiere of the next gen gaming consoles and each company is confident about its technological advantage over the competition. Xbox One vs PlayStation 4–which is more worthwhile? This question is probably what many fans are asking about both contenders. But what does this say about the developers who are working for some time on both these platforms?

Just recently, new rumors floated up that the PlayStation 4 is much faster than Xbox One. Edge published an article in which they interviewed various game developers anonymously and asked them to compare the performance of the next generation consoles from Sony and Microsoft. In the interview it was determined that the developers believe that the PS4 is 50% faster than the Xbox One to have “significant and obvious” advantages.

Developers revealed that the reading speed of the memory of PS4 is 50% faster than that of the Xbox One, as well as the same goes for the performance of the Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) of the CPU and GPU. Taking as reference to a development without any kind of optimization, a play on the Sony console could be achieved in Full HD and 30FPS, while the Microsoft platform would be able to handle it with 20 FPS and a resolution of 1600×900. The second position is that if the mechanism is generated by procedures or done by tracing light [memory script], it is likely that the Xbox One can run it more quickly.

“Xbox One is weaker and it’s a pain to use its ESRAM,” said one developer.

Other developer said that “the hardware isn’t locked,” and that both Microsoft and Sony are still working on graphics drivers for each console. They note that “the Xbox One is lagging behind in this regard.”

Microsoft, it seems, is aware of this problem and it recently increased the clock speed of the CPU, but one developer told the site that while “the clock speed update is not significant, it does not change things that much.”

On a flip side, there are some advantages of using Xbox One. “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,” one developer said.

Even with the differences in hardware and figures given by the experts cited by Edge, many believe that game development tailored to the individual capacities of a console could create political problems between platforms, developers and publishing houses.

Both Sony and Microsoft, of course, are encouraging developers to take advantage of the unique characteristics of each console (Kinect and DualShock 4), but there seems to be very little enthusiasm among developers surveyed by Edge. In addition, in spite of the performance gap between the two platforms, the launch titles will appear in a very similar between the two formats.

“They really want us to make use of platform specific stuff to give their version a leg up over the other,” said one developer. “But unless there’s a good design reason or incentive we rarely do.”

The publication also noted that more improvements and scope of both consoles will be put on the market once the developers become more familiar with the hardware. The hardware is not yet final and the introduction of new driver could reduce the gap between the two parties. Much improved graphics drivers plus the power of the cloud might yet tip the balance in Xbox One’s favor.

[Update: The title mistakenly said “50 times faster” when the story is that the PS4 is “50% faster” this has been fixed to correctly match the text of the article.]


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