Wii U vs PS4 vs Xbox One FULL SPECS (January 24, 2014)

[zarx]

superchunk said:

Those "missing" details (like type of ram) are confirmed by pictures of the inside of XOne. It is known.

360 had many areas that looked better than PS3 early on (definitely not now) due to

1) the head start EVERY dev had on X360 hardware vs PS3

2) the massive complexity and learning curve PS3 hardware game devs largely due to its CPU

That's all different now as XOne and PS4 share nearly identical hardware design. However, I argued already that they will end up identical as devs will code for the lowest common denominator i.e. the slightly weaker Xone GPU and slower RAM. Then scale down further with the help of modern engines to make sure game works on WiiU as well.

I don't think "lowest common denominator" means what you think it means... Lowest common denominator means the lowest point of a range, if they were designing a game to be able to scale down to the Wii U then it would be the lowest common denominator. Modern engines won't help scale to the Wii U ether currently the only next gen engine we know about Unreal Engine 4 will not natively support Wii U so won't help at all. Cryengine 3 and other older engines that are scaled up to next gen do support it tho and Luminous will support X360 and PS3 so that might make it over, but even the spruced up Frostbyte 2/3 doesn't have support for Wii U (despite it already targeting older platforms) so engine support for Wii U in modern engines is already looking sketchy, we will see if Panta Rhei and other such "modern" engines make it over. And before you make the argument of course developers could scale any game down if they really wanted but whether they think it's worth it and whether the resaults will be any good are different questions entirely, already a lot of developers have written off the Wii U while still using old engines and making games that would be easy to scale (in fact most games today are still targeting the weaker X360 and they still don't think the Wii U is worth a port, going the extra mile to down port rather than side port will make it even less likely) so that situation is only going to get worse once games actually start to be designed with a higher common denominator in mind than the X360/PS3 (even most next gen exclusives started development as PS360 games and were scaled up so far).

I suspect most devs will follow Ubisoft's lead and develop scalably on PC (currently with PS360 level being the lowest end, but that will naturally raise over the coming years for most AAA games) and port the apropriate feature set to each console as appropriate anyway. Which will mean that they can make effective use of all available hardware, the lowest common denominator will remain X360 for most games for the next couple years anyway.