Are XBONE graphics closer to Wii U than PS4?

[freedquaker]

JoeTheBro said:

With the recent news that MGS:GZ is 720p 60fps on the XBONE, is anyone else starting to feel that the system is closer in terms of graphics to the Wii U than the PS4? There's certainly a large gap between the XBONE and Wii U, no one is denying that, but the gap between the PS4 and XBONE appears even larger. I'm certainly thinking so.

Technically, XB1 is about 8x X360 in terms of raw power. In comparison, PS4 is about 10x PS3. Also as a reminder, PS3 has roughly 20% more power than X360, so roughly speaking; let's normalize X360 to 100

X360 : 100
PS3 : 120
XB1 : 800
PS4 : 1200

The problem with that comparison is that those are theoretical performance levels. Although PS3 theoretically had a 20% advantage, it was much harder to utilize the performance and with equal amount of effort, a PS3 could utilize only 80% performace of an X360, which only improved later on.

So what's up with the XB1? If the raw power gap (50% advantage in favor of PS4) was the only issue, we wouldn't be talking about this now, and most third party games would be on parity with 10-15 fps higher on PS4 platform and that'd be it. However, the major issue is far worse than that. X360 had 10 MB EDRAM, while XB1 has merely 32 MB ESRAM, which is a 3.2X as much. So, although the raw performance has increased by 8 folds, the paltry 3.2x increase in ESRAM creates a huge bottleneck on XB1, leading to a much greater disparity on the XB1, way more than 50%. 

 

In short, although XB1 is about 4x as fast as WiiU at 720p, which is not so far behind PS4, it just is crippled in the sense that it usually cannot handle 1080p.