Several "high-level game development sources" have claimed Sony's upcoming next-generation gaming console, the PlayStation 4, is around 50 percent faster than its Microsoft rival's next-gen console, the Xbox One. Many have even gone as far as to say the split between the two consoles speeds are "significant" and "obvious."
To dive deeper into this problem, Edge, conducted interviews with anonymous sources who claim to be industry insiders. Most of these sources agreed that the memory reads on Sony's PS4 are up to 50 percent faster.
Contacts from Edge have put the PS4's memory reads at 40-50 percent quicker than Xbox One. The ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit) is around 50 percent faster. One basic example Edge uncovered suggested "without optimization for either console, a platform-agnostic development build can run at around 30FPS in 1920×1080 on PS4, but it'll run at '20-something' FPS in 1600×900 on Xbox One. 'Xbox One is weaker and it's a pain to use its ESRAM,'"
Microsoft is aware that its specs lag behind the PlayStation 4 and has recently upped the clock speed of the Xbox One. The hope is that this will be the first measure to close the gap on the PS4 before both consoles hit store shelves in November. Unfortunately, one developer downplayed the significance of the clock speed change.
"The clock speed update is not significant, it does not change things that much. He said. "Of course, something is better than nothing."
It's important to note that the hardware on either device is by no means locked in. There are still many months to go before the consoles become available to the public and that gives Microsoft plenty of time to bridge the gap, especially now that they know where the Xbox One falls behind.
Xbox One does have the edge of the PS4 in other ways. "Lets say you are using procedural generation or raytracing via parametric surfaces - that is, using a lot of memory writes and not much texturing or ALU - Xbox One will be likely be faster," said one developer.
Despite the gap in the competitors speeds, users will likely have difficulty seeing a difference between the two devices at launch. Any difference will be negligible as developers scramble to meet tight deadlines. It is often more efficient for them to simply make identical versions rather than take the time to specially utilize console-specific features like the DualShock 4's touchpad or the Xbox One's Kinect.
The PlayStation 4 will hit shelves in North America on November 15 and the Xbox One will do the same on November 22.
