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FlamingWeazel on 28 January 2014
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freedquaker said:
bugrimmar said:

I'm not here for a flame war. I'm just wondering..

Prior to all of the evidence (Tomb Raider, Battlefield 4, Call of Duty, etc.) I kept saying here that there will be no power difference, that it would be small and no one would notice any of it. However, now I can't help but notice.

Last generation, PS3 came a year after the 360, so the power difference was expected and justified. This generation, PS4 and Xone came out at the same time but the power difference is still extremely noticeable, even though Xone is $100 more expensive. I don't get how you can use inferior graphical technology when you're more expensive and releasing at the same time. How can a major company like Microsoft make such a mistake? It's like Nvidia releasing a last gen piece of hardware at the same time as ATI releasing a brand new graphics card.


Look, there is a very easy and clear explanation to this. Microsoft doesn't know how to design hardware. It doesn't mean XB1 hardware design is crap, it's just the very same formula they have been implementing ever since original XBOX. This is what MS did in 3 generations of Xbox...

- Get a cheap & sufficient off the shelf CPU  (Celeron => PowerPC => AMD APU)

- Get a cheap & midrange off the shelf GPU (Nvidia => ATI => AMD)

- Put a reasonable amount of Unified slow RAM (64 MB => 512 MB => 8 GB)

- Compensate the sluggish RAM with Edram (4 MB => 10 MB => 32 MB)

 

As you see, they always applied the same architecture, just at larger & faster configuration every generation. The problem here arises with the Edram (or Esram as it's called in XB1). The fast Esram technology has not improved much. Although they were able to increase 16X as much, they couldn't do this with Esram. Also 32 MB RAM Esram, which was deemed to be the minimum necessary, took too much place in the die. So they had to sacrifice some of the computing units in the SOC, therefore rendering the GPU less powerfull than PS4's solution.

They never thought of using GDDR5 as their ambitions for a media hub mandated them to use 8 GB (rather than 4) and they didn't envision that the yields and economics would be in place for 8 GB GDDR5. Sony, on the other hand, never had those media hub envisions, and were fine with 4 GB GDDR5, so they gambled, and found out the yields are much better than expected, and ended up putting 8 GB instead.

So XB1 is not only less powerful due to an outdated and inefficient design, but it is also actually more expensive to build. PS4 does not only have a better GPU and much faster RAM but also includeses an extra Arm processor and extra memory etc, utilizing the extra space on the die (which is occupied by the Esram on XB1!). Overall PS4 design is leagues better than that of XB1.

Good post sums it up but you also have to factor in kinect, thats on top of everything else inflates the price.