Indepth Look a Xbox One's 'GPU'

[Zappykins]

selnor1983 said:
Ill be honest alot of this is over my head. I know some bits, but others i need to research.

from what I understand is that ps4 will have more graphical power but not by much. In fact the difference wont be that noticeable.

i get the impression though Microsoft from the beginning put alot of focus on the xbox one doing alot of things simultaneously. I believe from my understanding the xbox one will be faster than ps4 at multitasking, simultaneous video processing etc.

Microsoft seem to have built a machine that is great for graphics and great at everything else to.

looking forward to using my console and tv for gaming, surfing the web, snapping in apps simultaneously and having windows 8 apps available. Should really change the face of consoles and its uses as we know it.

While yes the PS4 does have a more powerful GPU, it may not end up looking or working that way.  First from just a hardware perspective one of the things Sony is doing is asking the developers to use the GPU for sound.  So that takes away some of the GPU's processing.  As this article states the Xbox One has 7 separate co-processors for sound (other articles quote 2) to free up the CPU. That's just kind of weird if that Sony thing turns out to be true.

Plus, from the software side, Microsoft is really good at getting performance out of hardware.  They work hard to make DirectX a platform programmers want to use.  Look at the Windows Phones, they run better than android, while android has much more powerful hardware.  You can often make a ten fold increase in performance by switching software.  I remember at a job years ago we switched from Mac to PC, and while the hardware was relatively on par, their was and 18 times increase in performance.  So literately, what would take a couple of hours on the Mac could be performed in 6 minuted on the PC. 

While I'm not quire sure if it's true, many sources are saying the Xbox One's CPU is at least twice as powerful as the PS4's CPU.  So conceivably the Xbox One could have a significantly higher frame rate, and the CPU does more processing and the GPU just has to render the scene. Sony reminds me of that cousin that really wants to do well and boast to challenge others.  Studies hard for class, then shows up late for the test.  You route for them, but they always trip up somewhere, and you feel bad for them.

I'm really looking forward to it's TV switching as you described.  Especially when my local cable keeps moving around the channels.  It's going to be a neat little system.