PS4 vs XBox One – What’s the Difference?

Media Services:
One thing currently missing from Sony’s launch list is a new version of Play TV, which turns a PS3 in to a Freeview+ box with a well-designed and fast interface. What PS4 needs is an HD version, something that the original Play TV never supported. Xbox One on the other hand, had considerably more attention paid to TV than to games at their announcement meeting. All Xbox Ones will have a fully Kinect controlled TV interface with on-screen Skyping and Binging. And fantasy football. It has since been announced that it will only work in conjunction with a proportion of cable and satellite boxes. None have been confirmed as yet, so it seems that they’ve spent a long time selling us something they’re yet to be able to deliver.

Aside from live TV, services like Netflix, Love Film, 4OD, iPlayer, Mubi and Sky Now will be on both consoles. So aside from Zune for MS and Music Unlimited for Sony it will probably be business as usual, just faster. Both online stores are expanding their content for sale and rental, but two things prevent them from being a real success: The price points are too high, and the library is too small. With other providers on the same machine offering more for less, there is rarely a reason to buy a movie or tv show from the store.

PS3’s customisable music video channel Vidzone is a great way to deliver an MTV experience, and it’s even more like MTV because all of the music is crap. The model for it is sound and it would be good to see it continue in to the next generation, but only if one or both of the console manufacturers invested in a proper music library.

Grunt:
Both manufacturers have chosen what you might call ‘off the shelf’ technology to power their machines, not only that they’ve chosen remarkably similar components. That said there are some obvious differences, both have 8GB of RAM, standard for a good computer these days, but Sony have chosen to use a faster kind of RAM, whilst Xbox will sport standard DDR3, its competitor with be rocking GDDR5. That’s the same memory used in mid to high end graphics cards, whilst that is in itself impressive, it remains to be seen if it isn’t overkill. A system is only as fast as its slowest component.  The main differences in the insides of the machines are likely to be far more subtle, or indeed, invisible.

Sony have been thoroughly transparent in telling us exactly what’s going on inside their black box, and it looks like testament to the quality of the PS4 that Microsoft have been far more vague. The extra sharing features and background recording of the PS4 for example is handled by a separate, secondary processor, so that no CPU power is diverted from what’s important, the game. That decision sounds like it came out of the hard lessons learned on PS3 when they didn’t plan to allocate any memory or processing power to extra features like cross-game chat. Something that it became clear simply wasn’t possible. This time they’re taking no chances.

They’ve also been so kind as to let us know about the arrangement of processors, which actually makes a big difference to processing power. Distance, even millimetres, between communicating components is a factor in all computer design. Sony have stated that their CPU and GPU will be on the same die, meaning virtually zero latency between the two. The difference may only be the tiniest fraction of a second, but times that by 500,000,000 calculations per second and that is a significant cumulative huke in power. So far we know very little about Xbox One in terms of its interior design, and again, it’s hard not to think that silence speaks volumes.

The main differences aren’t necessarily going to be down to the hardware though. They’re also going to be down to the way in which game code interacts with the hardware. MS use Direct X, the same as in Windows, and there is a relatively heavy layer of software between the coder and the hardware, this can slow down processing, although there are many ways developers find over the course of a console’s lifespan to optimise performance. This is the reason why comparisons between PC specs and console specs are completely extraneous, the design and implementation of hardware is completely different and consoles use similar or the same technologies far more efficiently. Sony, whose console will finally support Open GL – a more or less universal code – natively (PS3’s cell processor was so ‘exotic’ they had to emulate it), have made the machine quite developer-centric, and are encouraging their developers to get ‘closer to the metal’. This all points to the PS4 having an advantage in terms of raw power, but it’s up to the game makers to take advantage of it.

And Finally…
It’s clear that both machines will be powerful, one being more so than the other, but in real terms that will make little difference to gamers. Multiplatform games will look virtually identical, because what’s the point in developers spending time and money making one version better than the other? The price points will make a difference, and it’s unlikely that the Xbox One will change its RRP before launch, but realistically you can spend £500 on either depending on what package you end up with.

So are there really going to be any meaningful differences between the two? Well yes. And it’s the thing that defines every generation, its games. And what that comes down to is a matter of taste. A die hard Xbox fan will never play Heavy Rain or The Last of Us. A Sony fanboy will never play Gears of War, and it’s up to us as consumers to decide what we want to miss out on.