Sony have emphasized a lot on the GPU compute capabilities of the PlayStation 4. But the question is, will multiplatform games explore this added advantage on the PS4? Cevat Yerli, founder, CEO and president of Crytek was asked about his thoughts on PS4’s GPU compute and this what he said:
“GPU compute is definitely the future. The CPU performance is better than last-gen but not by a huge margin, the GPU on the other hand is a really sizeable improvement. If the task is suited to it, moving to the GPU can be an incredible performance win. However, this is taking away performance from the traditional graphics pipeline so there is a limit to what you can move to the GPU.
As for the broader multi-platform question, supporting GPU compute isn’t really much more difficult than supporting multi-platform rendering, so it’s certainly something we’ll be using more and more on all platforms,” he said in a tech interview with EuroGamer.
It seems at this point both systems have a set of unique advantages. Xbox One’s board memory has a bandwidth of just 68GB/s, but it is more or less offsetted by the on-chip ESRAM, which tops out at 204GB/s whereas the PS4 has faster GDDR5 RAM and reportedly powerful GPU.
It will ultimately depend on the developers on how they will use these unique features in their games. The PS4 and Xbox One are out next month. Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.