With the upcoming release of the next-gen gaming consoles from Sony and Microsoft, gamers out there are standing on tiptoes wondering what console will dominate the console wars this time around.
Sony’s PlayStation4 is scheduled for release on November 15 in America and November 29 in Europe and Australia, whereas Microsoft’s Xbox One is gearing up for release on November 22, all across markets in America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.[break]
PlayStation4 is slightly cheaper, coming with a price tag of US$399 whereas Xbox One sells for US$499, which includes the Kinect Sensor, Microsoft’s voice and video recognizing hardware.
So which one of these gaming beasts is better and which one would be a worthwhile investment ?
Talking about the specifications of the two consoles, both consoles come equipped with very similar hardware. Both consoles are powered by an AMD8-Core Jaguar CPU and both use the new APU technology that links both the CPU and GPU together into one package. Although both consoles have similar CPUs, the Xbox One performs slightly faster, which runs at a 1.75 GHZ, in comparison to the PlayStation4, which runs at 1.6 GHz. But while talking about gaming rigs and gaming consoles, this difference in CPU speed hardly matters, what really makes a difference is the GPU, responsible for all the graphics that the console has to render for high-definition games.
As far as gaming goes, gamers are worried about graphics. Even in the case of GPUs, both of these consoles come equipped with identical GPUs, powered again by AMD Radeon. Although both of these consoles have similar GPUs, they are not equal, because the PS4’s graphics processor seems to be 50% more powerful than the Xbox One in light of PS4’s 1152 shader processors against Xbox One’s 768. But even if Microsoft understands that they lagged behind on GPU power and upped the Xbox One’s GPU speed from 800 MHz to 853 MHz, even with this upgrade, the Xbox One does not match up to the PS4. The GPU on the PS4 also sports an impressive 8GB of GDDR5 RAM that is bound to have a higher bandwidth than the Xbox One’s 8 GB DDR3 RAM. If the Xbox One had only been shipped with the older and slower DDR3 RAM, Microsoft would be in serious trouble. But because of the 32 MB of eSRAM that they have used as a graphic cache to bridge the speed gap, the Xbox does not fall far behind. But all in all, the PS4 does seem to be more powerful than the Xbox One.
Buying a console in the end boils down to the games you’ll be playing on it, and both consoles have pretty impressive games that gamers can see released for both consoles, like Assassin’s Creed IV, Battlefield 4, Call of Duty: Ghosts, Fifa 14 and Need for Speed: Rivals. These games will be available for both consoles and should look similar on both devices because they’re released as ports to each other. Apart from these games, both consoles will also have exclusive games that work solely on their respective consoles. The exclusives on the Xbox One would be the extra-terrestrial first-person shooter, Halo 5; the third-person action adventure involving hordes of zombies, Dead Rising 3; a racing game with hundreds of cars and beautiful visuals that aims to compete with Grand Turismo, Forza Motorsport 5 and finally the first-person multiplayer shooter developed by the old heads of development team of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Titanfall.
On the PlayStation 4, the exclusive games include Driveclub, a racing game that includes an arcade type take on racing; Killzone: Shadowfall, a first-person shooter with beautiful graphics but a very grim approach; Infamous: Second Son, a third-person action game that lets you play as a man with superpowers. Apart from these, PlayStation will also be receiving Knack, Octodad: Deadliest Catch and The Order: 1886 as exclusives.
The Xbox 360 was one step behind the PlayStation 3 on the optical drive department because the PS3 had already introduced a new-gen Blu-ray technology whereas the Xbox remained with the DVD. But because of the relatively small size of previous generation games, this did not cause much problems for the Xbox. But now, both consoles come equipped with a Blu-ray reader and also come with 500 GBs of storage. These hard-drives will also be used for game installs because of the fact that game data will be transferred much faster through a hard-drive than an optical drive.
Coming down to the controllers, Sony has redesigned the Dualshock 4 controller considerably whereas Microsoft’s Xbox Controller remains much the same. The Dualshock 4 controllers now integrate the Move control right into the controller so now the controller can be used like the Move Sticks for PS3. Sony has also packed a touchpad in between the D-Pad and the face controls to provide much more control over the games running on the screen. This in comparison to the Xbox’s controller that includes a battery compartment, Wi-Fi Direct and new triggers, falls short, although Microsoft claims to have included more the 40 upgrades to the new controller.
So, as an afterthought to the technological introduction to the two consoles, the Xbox One is definitely a powerful console but the PS4 seems to be much powerful than its competitor. Xbox definitely has more games out there but there are worthy games on the PS4 too. But what merits the PS4 is the fact that it has more graphical power to offer, and although games on both consoles pretty much look the same now, the PS4 is bound to come up with graphically superior games much after its release.
The writer is The Week’s much loved tech guru. Email us your tech queries at theweek@myrepublica.com and we’ll have him answer them for you.
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