With the first round of announcements behind us, the only thing that’s clear in the inevitable and perpetual Xbox One vs. PlayStation 4 battle is that there is no clear winner. Microsoft finally unveiled its next-generation video game console on Tuesday and once all the dust settled, Anandtech’s Anand Lal Shimpi took a step back and laid out everything we know about these two beastly consoles. Lal Shimpi’s analysis is extensive and thorough, as always, but it boils down to this: Based on what we know at this point, Sony has the edge in terms of specs and raw power.
Lal Shimpi compiled all the known specs for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 alongside the current-generation Xbox 360 in the following grid:
Anandtech’s complete analysis is recommended reading, but here are the nuts and bolts in terms of hardware:
While both consoles make use of an eight-core AMD Jaguar processor — which is a big win for AMD — the PlayStation 4 features 1,152 GPU cores compared to the Xbox One’s 768 graphics cores. Sony’s new console drives 1.84 TFLOPS as a result, compared to the new Xbox’s peak shader throughput of 1.23 TFLOPS.
The PlayStation 4 also has the edge when it comes to system memory, featuring 8GB of 5500MHz GDDR5 memory compared to the Xbox One’s 8GB of 2133MHz DDR3 RAM. Embedded memory and embedded memory bandwidth for the PlayStation 4 are still unknown.
What does all this mean? In terms of raw gaming power, Sony’s PlayStation 4 is the clear winner. As we have discussed in the past, however, Microsoft and Sony’s missions appear to be diverging to an extent, as Microsoft continues to layer more home entertainment features on top of the Xbox’s gaming features.
For hardcore gamers though, the PlayStation 4 seems like the better bet at this point — assuming the allure of Microsoft’s IllumiRoom project is removed from the equation.
