PS4 Is 50% More Powerful Than Xbox One, Developer Confirms

Blair Inglis 31 Comments

The PS4, at its cheaper price of £349 compared to the Xbox One’s £429, is the more powerful console, according to a series of tweets from Adrian Chmielarz, the former Creative Director of developer People Can Fly.

He clarifies that this should not affect the Xbox One too much in a post over on GAF, noting that the Xbox 360 is more powerful than the PS3 yet Naughty Dog have managed to make the best looking game this generation with The Last of Us, so a great developer can still manage to make a great game. It’s a great insight and well worth a read.

Furthermore, Microsoft’s Director of Product Planning, Albert Penello responded “don’t know ’em” in a tweet pointing out the original statement, dodging the question and showing his frustration at the developer in one simple tweet.

So, PS4 might be better when developing but I still think the Xbox One will have some of the best looking exclusives in the next generation.

Source: NeoGAF

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31 Comments

  1. Don’t know where he’d get 50% from, the PS4 has more compute units in the GPU & far more bandwidth around the system.

    But the Xbox One has 32MB of superfast eDRAM & no one really knows the power of this secret sauce yet… And Microsoft obviously has DirectX and developers always seem super happy with Microsoft’s tools

    So I take any story about one system being more powerful than the other with a pinch of salt.

    • The eDRAM will most likely be used for a full 1080p framebuffer, as it is being used on WiiU: http://hdwarriors.com/general-impression-of-wii-u-edram-explained-by-shinen/

    • How the developers cope with all these differences in power and memory and still produce such similar multi platform games is a mystery to me, they’re clever buggers. I wonder how GTA V will compare across the two platforms this month? Seems to me it’ll be the last huge, non-annual release we’ll probably see this generation, so it should be the pinnacle of polished production!

    • cc_star what are you going on about? it has been known for a while the PS4 is between 40/50% more powerful why do you think MS are still trying to tweak there system 2 months from launch.

    • Nothing you say can change the FACT that it’s more powerful. You really going against a developer here who knows his stuff and is neutral to things?

      Also, I don’t think the Xbox One will have some of the best looking exclusives. Look at the PS3. Much harder to work with than the 360, and pumped out the best looking first party games. Imagine those same studios with the power and simplicity of the PS4?

      I mean, just look at inFamous: Second Son and Killzone: Shadowfall. The two most visually impressive next gen games in my opinion.

      • You’d be surprised how many junior games programmers are just idiots who participate in the same fanboy wars as the children on the playground.

    • The biggest issue is ops…and ops cost. Doesn’t matter how fast the eDRAM is if the operations between the next call to the Move Engines doesn’t account for the IO between the DDR3 and the eDRAM, plus the eDRAM hasn’t been scaled to the same amount as the difference in main mem between 360 and X1. The Move Engines may well be engineered well and a great headline spec feature, but their use will cost. Which is why I really don’t think the discussions over MS upgrading their clocks will really make that much of a difference – they may well have had to increase the clocks to try to alleviate the cost of the memory ops.

    • PS4 has a more advanced version of it from what I have read.

    • The edram just makes the Xbox One really complex to code for.

      Digital foundry also confirmed 50% more powerful. Or does everyone now ignore then when it doesn’t fit what they want to hear…

    • There’s not really much difference in the feature sets between DirectX 11.1 and OpenGL 4.3. Unless you have developers who attribute massive physical pain to some fairly simple porting, it’s not going to be that important.

  2. 50% power in raw numbers never equates to games looking 50% better.

    On the flip side don’t put too much stock in the 32 meg of ESDRAM in the Xbox One. It’s there to fill a deficiency in the lower bandwidth DDR3 RAM.

    As I’m sure you’ll all relate, 32 megabytes is nothing in modern terms, so the developer will have to prioritise what is stored there to recall again rapidly. Couple of high res textures and you are done really.

    Is it really worth the extra programming work? Maybe. Does it outperform in terms of efficiency a faster form of unified memory? Of course not.

  3. It’s all well and good being, in specs at least, more powerful but unless you have good games to go with it then it’s for nothing. As Adrian pointed out the 360 had the better processing power but as far as I’m concerned the PS3 had far superior games overall. Not just in graphics, Naughty Dog particularly, but in gameplay experiences. That’s why I only ever owned a PS3 and why I trust this trend of great experiences to continue with the PS4. Sony has some seriously good first party devs after all.

  4. I find this figure completely pointless to wave around, and it’s actually going to be a lot closer in real terms than this.

    what we do know is that the CPUs will be roughly equivalent, maybe with a slight advantage to the X1 in light of the recent clock speed bump, whilst the PS4’s GPU is more powerful. RAM can also come into the mix somewhere, and could hamper the X1.

    However, there’s not a 50% difference by any means, and I think it might have been Cerny himself that stated that the GPU difference won’t necessarily mean that big a jump.

    It will have to come from first parties, who can really get into the nitty gritty of coding “to the metal” to get the best out of the hardware on both platforms, but we’ll see fantastic looking games on either side of the fence.

    • Also, it is widely regarded that the PS3 as a whole was more powerful than the X360, but only once you were able to get into the SPUs in a big, big way, as first party devs have been able to, and work around some of the hardware’s flaws.

      • Isn’t Cell more powerful than the PS4’s CPU? Numbers mean little.

      • But crucially, the 360 gpu was slightly better, so unless you had more than 2 years of dev time and very good programmers, multi-plat games were always going to look better on 360 due to not taking advantage of the exotic CELL.

        Not to mention 360 had unified RAM which is much more flexible.

    • sure he has worked on the systems to say what he is saying.

      • But crucially this statement is word of mouth…

      • this is about the 4th time it has been said now DF even say that is the case.

    • Agreed, fella. When Digital Foundry (for all of it’s strangeness) looked at specced PCs that tried to emulate the next gen consoles, they noted anywhere between a 10 to 25% difference in frame-rate which is considerable but easy to close if Microsoft work hard (or the multi-plat titles are lazily brought across). Hopefully, the PS4 will be the lead platform for years to come although it sounds like both will be easy enough to port to and from the PC.

    • This is the 4th or 5th developer to come up with the 50% figure and digital foundry went into allot of detail about how it’s true, so it pretty laughable seeing desperate fanboys trying to discredit it.

  5. Not this hoary old chestnut yet again….

    I’ve lived through so many generations of hardware and the question of which is more powerful is utterly meaningless.My Atari 800XL had lot more CPU power and far more colours than the C64 i bought after it, yet it lacked the SID chip and number of sprites C64 offered.My Mega Drive had a faster CPU than the SNES, but weaker soundchip, less colours etc.The PS1 i bought on day 1 was a 3D powerhouse, yet the saturn i picked up years later beat it hands down on 2D and had more powerful soundchip, my Dreamcast was beaten on paper by the PS2 i still own, in terms of raw polygon pushing power, yet had more on-board Ram than PS1+PS2 combined, so delivered rich textures.

    I own a PS3+360, along with Heavy Rain, all 3 Uncharted’s, all 3 Gears Of War games, Halo 4 etc etc.I still say 1 of the best looking games this generation was Alan wake, which ran at 540P.

    Both 360+PS3 have stunning looking games coded for the hardware specific.PS3 Wipeout Hd etc would be ‘impossible’ to do part for part on 360, as it’s coded for PS3 hardware strengths, just as say Tempest 2000 was for the Atari Jaguar-Minter coding 2 chips ‘backwards’ and thus Saturn port, whilst running on far more powerful hardware, is weaker version, Travellers Tales coded Sonic R for strength’s of Saturn, said effects would be imposible to do on Playstation, (Wipeout HD re-sizes resolutions on the fly using PS3 tricks by the way), Quake was at 1 time said to be impossible on PS1, 7 developers had tried and failed to deliver it, Saturn had it, cur Hammerhead and PS1 Quake 2….Shinny said MDK was impossible to do on PS1, needed Pentium PC, i still have PS1 version and fantastic it is too.

    I honestly wish developers would just focus on delivering ground breaking games, rather than putting out stuff like this, that does nothing but further fuel utterly pointless format wars.

    A high level PC is far more capable than both bloody consoles, so why worry?.Just buy machine that delivers the games you want to play.

    • Agreed. To a luddite like me, all these stats are meaningless. Just let me shoot something in HD and I’m happy as a pig in shit. ;)

  6. Sure you wanted to say ‘…but I still think the Xbox One will have some of the best looking exclusives in the next generation’…???
    You probably meant ‘some quite good looking, probably timed exclusives at the very start of the next generation’. ;o)

  7. These days the power of a system is not as important as it used to be. Developer tools and programming expertise can make a big difference.

  8. 50% is a lot. I’m sure the first party PS4 games will blow Xbox Ones out of the water with that advantage.

  9. I’ve not noticed any difference between the platforms, both have games that look great but I’ve not seen anything that looks significantly better than the other.

  10. not gonna comment on which system has more power, because.
    A: i don’t know.
    B: i don’t care.

    but Penello, “don’t know em”?

    Chmielarz was until recently the head of the devs that ported Gears 1 to pc and made Gears: Judgement, and he has no idea who he is?

    yeah right. >_>

    his next tweet was asking “who is this cliffy d, or whatever, guy?”

    • This is what got me to Haz,bet hes a real nice guy for those microsoft water cooler moments.Makes the skin crawl.

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