the biggest thing holding back the XBONEX is MS.  But sure, PS4 is the baseline this gen.  The bigger problem, as others have said, will be that everything has to run on the XBONES.  

The devs look to more incentives on using the lead platform ruling out hardware. Yes, One would hold back more than Pro. 3rd party games would look better on X than Pro.

Doesn't the xbox division have truck loads of money that they can buy exclusivity of 3rd party games with? Oh wait, daddy must have count off of their allowance or something. *shrugs

Phil can't really complain about exclusivity deals and marketing deals with 3rd party developers when ms was the first to make those kind of deals in the first place for the 360. MS is what is holding back xbox. It's not investing as much into it all around.

It's hard to point to specific examples because it's not something a company would want to talk about, but whenever two versions of a game are technically identical despite a relatively significant hardware difference it's either down to laziness (using the stronger platform's additional power as a time saver), or wanting them to be the same. I think we can reasonably assume the latter will have been the case on some occasions. It's not always just consoles either; occasionally PC versions get actively held back so they don't look too different from the console versions.

I doubt marketing deals have much effect one way or another. Paying for a technical advantage wouldn't be worth the risk of that deal being made public.

Or maybe some developers set a benchmark and both consoles hit it, no holding back involved. I just don't  think  identicalversions means forced parity every time. We always here about the 40% power difference between PS4 and XB1, but are gamers willing to pay for 40% more development time? Developers don't have unlimited resources, and I find it terrible that people (not necessarily you) are actually offended that a game looks the same. It sucks when PC games get downgraded, but my point still stands. 

I brought up marketing deals because everyone assumed that was the case with AC Unit, and now there are similar rumors about Destiny 2. 

Of course it doesn't mean forced parity every time. I don't think it's even the case in the majority of instances, all I've said is that i think it likley happens sometimes. That's all.

I think people are being rather premature with this Destiny 2. We don't even know if there is parity between the Pro and X versions yet, just that they run at the same frame-rate. With both having awful CPUs, i expect frame-rate parity will be the standard. Image quality is what both of these machines have been built for, not fluidity.

On a side note, 40% more power rarely (if ever) translates to 40% more development time. Most major multi-plats are linearly scaled down to the PS4 and X1, and they share the same architecture. That makes adjusting for power differences easy. On average it should take about the same amount of time to push the PS4 and X1 to the same relative level (e.g. 900p vs 1080p).

Yes, Sony will force a game to run worse than the devs wants on a console... not the dev themselves wouldn't put the effort to make it better... of course sony having this power wouldn't do something more effective like getting the game only for them.

Check out Digital Foundrys analysis of latest Assassins Creed game on XBox X. It does 30fps but does not make it to native 4k, rather uses checkerboarding like the Pro. It appears that X is not that much more powerful in practise, and looking at the CPU spec. the difference is about 10% to Pro.

It is significantly more powerful than the Playstation 4 Pro. That cannot be disputed.
10% improvement is also a laughable statement.

But anyone who claimed that Scorpio was going to do 4k, 60fps on every title was silly, you should take their opinions with at truck load of salt.
These consoles are NOT using high-end hardware and thus will not ever achieve such a thing with the technology AMD has currently in their repertoire.

To be fair though, the Sony drums were championing 4k when the Playstation 4 Pro was only just a rumour. They were wrong as well.

I wouldnt use the term "significant" to define a slight bump in cpu clock speed, 2.1 vs 2.3