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EDGE: "Power struggle: the real differences between PS4 and Xbox One performance"

A

artist

Banned
onQ123 said:
I know it's 14 I'm saying that it could be using the clusters that came up short one CU.


so 2 full clusters plus 2 clusters that came up short of 1 CU = the 3 CU clusters not going to waste & a new line of GCN GPU's.
Click to expand...
The CU density for Bonaire is about the same as other GCN chips so I dont think there are any extra CUs hiding in there (or not used due to yield).
 
B

Biker19

Banned
SPE said:
Disregard the term 'balance'. It is meaningless. It's used is just there to seed the doubt that the PS4 is somehow unbalanced. It's not a technical term, just a carefully selected marketing one. And the Xbone is the more complicated design, due to its RAM.

The PS4 trumps the Xbone is all areas. It has a single pool of fast unified RAM. The Xbone as its main slow RAM, and a small chunk of fast RAM. Devs have to juggle what goes where, and as per the OP, are finding this to be a pain a big bottleneck.

The PS4 has 50% more CUs (the 'cores' of the GPU). With the recent 6% clock increase of the Xbone, this means that the peak performance of the PS4 is 40-50% more than the Xbone.

The PS4 has custom made chnages to its GPU to give it far more GPGPU capabilities. The PS4 has 8 ACEs (the things that manage GPGPU requests) and 64 queues (not to mention 18 CUs capable of running GPGPU). The Xbone has the standard AMD number of 2 ACEs and 2 queues, with only 14 CUs to run GPGPU on.

Many folks, from Cerny to devs, have said that making use of GPGPU will be the main thing that drives improvements this gen. The PS4 has significantly more room to grow.

The PS4 also has modifications to make sure it is hUMA compliant. The Xbone does not (nor could it, with having two pools of RAM). hUMA is the big direction that AMD have been heading towards.

Both consoles have a bunch of other DSPs for things like audio, decompression and security.

Multiple sources have said the PS4 is easier to develop for. Not only because it has ~50% more horsepower. Having one unified pool of RAM cuts out the need for devs to micro-manage what goes where, removing a big bottleneck (the same bottleneck the PS3 suffered with its two pools of RAM this gen).

Once Xbone devs get better that managing eSRAM and main RAM, there will be improvements and the days of sub-1080p games should be over. But the Xbone has far less customisation than the PS4, with less focus on GPGPU for long term gains.

Both consoles will see improvements over the coming years, but there is more untapped performance in the PS4 than in the Xbone.


There is a misunderstanding around what MS were saying around CUs. MS were trying to play of the fact that the PS4 have 50% more CUs by saying that power doesn't scale linearly with CUs. So the PS4 with 50% more CUs might only get 25% more performance in real gaming applications. But that's still 25%! Pretty massive, and more likely to be higher.

You don't have 'more problems' with more CUs. Adding more CUs is how you get different spec AMD cards in PCs. At a basic level, the more CUs, the more power. It just doesn't scale 1:1, but more is always better as far as performance goes. MS claimed that a slight clock bump was more benefital than enabling the two disabled CUs, but they were probably never in the position to enable them anyway, unless every single Xbone off the production like was tested to have 14 working CUs. Unlikely, as they had two spare to improve yields (an APU can be made with two faulty CUs and the chip still passes - it only needs 12 working).
Click to expand...

Good info. It seems that Sony has future-proofed the PS4 much more so than they did with the PS3 & much more so than Microsoft did with Xbox One.
 
L

LowEndTorque

Member
Pkm said:
I'm still floating between GAF and Xbox heavy influenced forum and trying to wrap my head around the "tech" talk.

Basically, I think, what I'm getting from info over thier is that thr Xbox is a balance of components that will, if I'm correct, will make it stronger?
While the PS4 is unbalanced with power in some parts but weak in others, there for making it unbalanced and in reality weaker.

I heard them refer to it as using a powerful hammer to swat flys instead or a fly swatter, or in terms of horspower in a car as a metaphor. ..saying as they go faster the PS4 actually loses power due to bottlenecks..

Is this nonsense? What exactly is the bottom line between these two?
Click to expand...

I literally could not believe what I was reading here. Had to pause for a few minutes to figure out if it was serious or a joke. I guess all that spin and PR bullshit is working?
 
C

CLEEK

Member
Biker19 said:
Good info. It seems that Sony has future-proofed the PS4 much more so than Microsoft did with Xbox One.
Click to expand...

TL;DR version.

* PS4 has a clear, significant advantage for traditional rendering.
* PS4 has a clear, significant advantage for GPGPU.
* PS4 is easier to develop for in the short term.
* PS4 has more customisation for better long term gains.
* Xbone using eSRAM muddies the waters, but general consensus is the PS4 has a clear RAM bandwidth advantage, and a single unified pool gives a clear development advantage.
 
tensuke

tensuke

Member
Pkm said:
The Xbox heavy influence site I've been frequenting is an offshoot of a now defunct TeamXbox forums
www.unionvgf.com is the site
Click to expand...

No offense but I read a few of the threads that involve tech talk and the most vocal members over there are flat out wrong about much of what they say. I don't have anything against the site itself, but don't take its members' posts about technical details with any ounce of truth. You'll see a lot more pro-PS4 posts here on GAF, but, they'll be subject to more scrutiny thanks to the larger userbase and traffic (which spawns 50-page threads like these) and will (generally) have their accuracy refined as more people join in the discussion.
 
S

SwiftDeath

Member
Radec said:
Been seeing people quote him for awhile now, who is he btw?
Click to expand...

As my follow-up post a little above yours states, I know Matt's an insider. One who carries a lot more weight than most on here short of cboat to my knowledge

I believe he's a third party dev with hands on both consoles at the moment so seems in the best position to tell us which is more powerful, easier to develop for etc.

He also rarely feels the need to post

stryke said:
Not in regards to the CPU with the numbers we have now.
Click to expand...

Sort of?

The clock speed is higher than what we believe the PS4's will be [PS4's hasn't been officially announced to my knowledge but 1.6 is most likely which is indeed < XB1's]

But it's not clear how many cores on each system will be reserved for OS use

I think maybe the XB1 has detailed how many cores it will reserve? Not sure though
 
D

demolitio

Member
SwiftDeath said:
As my follow-up post a little above yours states, I know Matt's an insider. One who carries a lot more weight than most on here short of cboat to my knowledge

I believe he's a third party dev with hands on both consoles at the moment so seems in the best position to tell us which is more powerful, easier to develop for etc.

He also rarely feels the need to post
Click to expand...

And that is what a lot of people have been waiting to hear from, right? The third-party devs that KNOW BOTH SYSTEMS? We've heard from a few but they were quickly forgotten for the most part and we all know most won't say a thing given how the industry goes. I just think Sony did a complete 180 from the PS3 while still keeping their core vision and it will help them in the long run. The X1 will have great games that wow me visually as well, but this discussion is about performance afterall. While I think some of the big MS studios will push out beautiful games, I feel that SSM and ND will absolutely stun me considering what they did with the PS3 when this generation's consoles were much closer together with their own pros and cons. Comparing exclusives are subjective of course, but that's where the true differences will be seen but it's interesting to hear a few third-party devs talk about the differences as well.

Now I'm sure the debate will switch back to whether or not that matter for multi-platform games since most might not put the effort into it but that's not the discussion at hand of course.

I'm just sitting here trying to picture what games will look like 5 years from now. Hell, people are raving about GTAV's performance on old hardware so imagine what VI will look like on new hardware with a budget of their size? They already manage to get so many little details down with little memory available so all I can say is "my body is ready" for what is to come. Naughty Dog will probably give me nerd chills for the first time in a while.

That's not to say that the X1 won't put out great looking exclusives over time, but as far as comparing actual performance, it should probably be pretty clear by now when there's multiple developers commenting on the differences at one point or another.

I'll say it again though: MS needs to stop bringing the comparisons up if they were smart and just focus on showing the great games and convince people it can still wow them instead of going into direct comparisons using assumptions, etc. I'm just glad Albert saw that post and responded and I hope he sticks to that because in all honesty, I'm a gamer and I just want good games so I'll follow them wherever they may be, especially now that there's not the bullshit that scared me away early on.

Like I said before too, even PC gamers should be happy because games will finally be pushing more and more complex geometry on screen and the games' worlds will finally feel real with a good amount of memory finally. It's just a good time to be a gamer regardless of your platform of choice so real civil discussions are all I look for instead of the non-stop bickering as if people have to justify their decisions to anyone else.

I'm a gamer wherever the games are and I'm just excited whether the game is on PC, PS4, X1, or a handheld even. The only sad thing is that I can only afford one console at launch and won't have much for games since my insurance was a prime target of the new healthcare bullshit and it's going to clean me out from what they've sent to me already for chronic illnesses.
 
S

stryke

Member
SwiftDeath said:
Sort of?

The clock speed is higher than what we believe the PS4's will be [PS4's hasn't been officially announced to my knowledge but 1.6 is most likely which is indeed < XB1's]

But it's not clear how many cores on each system will be reserved for OS use

I think maybe the XB1 has detailed how many cores it will reserve? Not sure though
Click to expand...

It was shown in the CPU profiler slide of the Killzone post mortem presentation. That's as official as it gets at that moment in time.

It would be nice to get an update if that's changed or not though but i'm inclined to believe that they haven't.
 
D

demolitio

Member
badb0y said:
From what we know at this time the Xbox One CPU is slightly better because its clocked at 1.75 Ghz as opposed to 1.6 Ghz in the PS4.
Click to expand...

Yea, and I don't see Sony risking an increase at this point considering they really aren't in a position to need to. Although I have no clue how good their cooling is in the PS4, it's a lot smaller in there so it might not be worth it to them. It'd be nice if they could confirm it though. Hell, I remember being ecstatic once I figured I could increase the PSP's clocks.

Any clock increases are nice, but small ones won't change much in the grand scheme of things unless everything else about the consoles were the same. It was kind of nice overclocking my PC's CPU going from 3.2 to 4.1GHz though since that's a good size boost. :D
 
C

CLEEK

Member
eddfromtheriver said:
SPE I respect your opinion. So i would appreciate if you'd share your thoughts on this:



Thanks!!!
Click to expand...

No, it's true, and I should have put it in my big ass post earlier.

The PS4 and Xbone's CPU is the exact same type. An 8-core Jaguar. Up until recently, they were both clocked at 1.6GHz.

The Xbone had a recent 150MHz clock bump, so it now runs at 1.75GHz, giving it a whopping 9 GFLOPs more than the PS4's CPU. Pretty trivial in the scheme of things, but at least one tick in the Xbone's favour at least. To put that in perspective, the PS4 GPU has 530 GFLOPs more than the Xbone's GPU.

PS4 - CPU - 8-core Jaguar @ 1.6GHz - 100 GFLOPS
Xbone - CPU - 8-core Jaguar @ 1.75GHz - 109 GFLOPS

What was traditional done on a CPU in current gen and older consoles, can now be done with GPGPU. So while the Xbone does have a 10% advantage for compute in the CPU, a lot of task will be offloaded to the GPU now. Look at Resogun with the crazy amount of voxels flying everywhere. On older consoles, this would have to have been calculated on the CPU. But Housemarque use GPGPU now, and the CPU is only ticking over at 50% usage (based on interviews with the Housemarque dev).
 
S

SwiftDeath

Member
demolitio said:
.
Click to expand...

AstroNut325 said:
Are you a developer?
Click to expand...

Perhaps I should clarify my earlier comment?

From previous posts by him and the reactions, it's obvious he must have proven to the mods that he's an insider

The 3rd party dev comment was my impression on who is based on previous discussions

I cannot guarantee that to be the case but do know the weight his posts hold

And therefore it would be the next logical leap

stryke said:
It was shown in the CPU profiler slide of the Killzone post mortem presentation. That's as official as it gets at that moment in time.

It would be nice to get an update if that's changed or not though but i'm inclined to believe that they haven't.
Click to expand...

Yes I agree. I fully expect a 1.6 for the PS4 and won't be too disappointed but I'm curious what resources both consoles will reserve for non-game applications at launch

Some we know some we don't
 
D

demolitio

Member
SwiftDeath said:
Perhaps I should clarify my earlier comment?

From previous posts by him and the reactions, it's obvious he must have proven to the mods that he's an insider

The 3rd party dev comment was my impression on who is based on previous discussions

I cannot guarantee that to be the case but do know the weight his posts hold

And therefore it would be the next logical leap



Yes I agree. I fully expect a 1.6 for the PS4 and won't be too disappointed but I'm curious what resources both consoles will reserve for non-game applications at launch

Some we know some we don't
Click to expand...



My post was in agreement with yours as I know who he is as well. I was just elaborating on that point and saying that Matt is the type of person people here have been waiting to hear from after using excuses for other things.

He's the kind of guy that people should want to hear from and not write it off as more nonsense but actual information from a third-party source meaning he can be familiar with both consoles.
 
E

eddfromtheriver

Banned
stryke said:
But not mine. I feel so cut now. T - T
Click to expand...

Sorry dude, i'm not familiar with your post history.

SPE said:
No, it's true, and I should have put it in my big ass post earlier.

The PS4 and Xbone's CPU is the exact same type. An 8-core Jaguar. Up until recently, they were both clocked at 1.6GHz.

The Xbone had a recent 150MHz clock bump, so it now runs at 1.75GHz, giving it a whopping 9 GFLOPs more than the PS4's CPU. Pretty trivial in the scheme of things, but at least one tick in the Xbone's favour at least. To put that in perspective, the PS4 GPU has 530 GFLOPs more than the Xbone's GPU.

PS4 - CPU - 8-core Jaguar @ 1.6GHz - 100 Glops
Xbone - CPU - 8-core Jaguar @ 1.75GHz - 109 Glops

What was traditional done on a CPU in current gen and older consoles, can now be done with GPGPU. So while the Xbone does have a 10% advantage for compute in the CPU, a lot of task will be offloaded to the GPU now. Look at Resogun with the crazy amount of voxels flying everywhere. On older consoles, this would have to have been calculated on the CPU. But Housemarque use GPGPU now, and the CPU is only ticking over at 50% usage (based on interviews with the Housemarque dev).
Click to expand...

Thanks for answering!

Who is this Matt guy?, a developer from where?
 
S

SwiftDeath

Member
demolitio said:
My post was in agreement with yours as I know who he is as well. I was just elaborating on that point and saying that Matt is the type of person people here have been waiting to hear from after using excuses for other things.

He's the kind of guy that people should want to hear from and not write it off as more nonsense but actual information from a third-party source meaning he can be familiar with both consoles.
Click to expand...

I realized you were in agreement I simply meant to clarify I don't know for certain who Matt is except that his words are not to be taken lightly

Yep wish we had more 3rd party devs that posted here
 
K

KidBeta

Junior Member
Pkm said:
The Xbox heavy influence site I've been frequenting is an offshoot of a now defunct TeamXbox forums
www.unionvgf.com is the site

I've been reading post such as...



and...



and you, this thread, well you guys in general are pretty famous over their lol



Every 3rd post mentions GAF lol
Click to expand...

Let me guess, those posts are made by a fellow called astrograd?.
 
W

WordsintheWater

Member
I can't believe people are still disputing whether or not the PS4's specs are stronger than the Xbox Ones. The numbers prove it, there's nothing really to discuss.
 
R

RE_Player

Member
Even though the Xbox One is weaker than the PS4 by a great margin I think we should all be happy that both these systems will use blu-ray. The FMV compression on 360 games these last couple years has been embarassing.
 
K

Kagari

Crystal Bearer
RE_Player said:
Even though the Xbox One is weaker than the PS4 by a great margin I think we should all be happy that both these systems will use blu-ray. The FMV compression on 360 games these last couple years has been embarassing.
Click to expand...

Yeah, especially when multiplat devs didn't bother encoding a better version for the PS3 or PC...
 
Z

Zen

Banned
SlickShoesRUCrazy said:
opa-ages is pro sony. gaf has more in common with it.

though they hate gaf too.

so it's a triangle really haha.
Click to expand...

Well considering that Opa-Ages is largely made up of banned gaffers one would expect them to hat gaf :p

Reading that TXB thread I don't see much critical thinking.... Sure Gaf is overall pro Sony on average but at least Gaf will spend posts talking about why they feel using a certain GPU as a comparison point is invalid. Logical arguements are presented. The closest thing in that thread on TXB 2.0 is closing your eyes and using your feels to say 'I think Microsoft will have the more powerful console because of balance'.

It's meaningless and willfully ignores basically... every leak and comment we've gotten thus far? How do they reconcile the EDGE article citing a 50% speed advantage for PS4? Do they even know it exists?
 
M

mrklaw

MrArseFace
RE_Player said:
Even though the Xbox One is weaker than the PS4 by a great margin I think we should all be happy that both these systems will use blu-ray. The FMV compression on 360 games these last couple years has been embarassing.
Click to expand...

May not help. With ram increasing by 16x from previous consoles, blurays may be needed for asset storage, which might not leave enough space for lovely video quality.
 
S

Skeff

Member
Kagari said:
Yeah, especially when multiplat devs didn't bother encoding a better version for the PS3 or PC...
Click to expand...

The Diablo 3 Cutscenes on PS3 annoy me, there is 10gb free space on a dingle layer Blu-ray and we're still stuck with the standard cut scenes, despite the Higher bitrate ones being available in the additional blu ray on the collectors edition of the PC version.

back on topic: I feel like there should be a thread on exact developer quotes regarding these consoles with links, but unfortunately I do not have the time to make this and it would probably be destroyed by the console war anyway.
 
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