While a lot has been said about the differences between the PS4 Pro, which represents a relatively conservative upgrade over the base PS4 system, versus the Xbox One X, which is a more radical overhaul of the Xbox One hardware, functionally, in the end, both systems do amount to the same result for the player- you get to play the same game, except now it’s prettier.
And as developers who have worked on both, the PS4 Pro and the Xbox One X, Zoink Games (the team behind Fe) seem to agree that the two consoles are more similar than you might give them credit for. Speaking to GamingBolt in an exclusive interview, Zoink Games programmer Johan Fröhlander stated that from their perspective, both upgrades ended up amounting to the same thing.
“From where we’re standing, they’re quite similar. Compared to their standard counterparts they give us more power for free as well as additional features exposed in Unity that we can fiddle around with. But as for pitching them against each other, we treat them quite the same,” Fröhlander said.
He also said that while the additional resources (such as the 12GB of GDDR5 memory) on the Xbox One X are useful and helpful to have, they won’t, for example, bleed over into PC game development, and raise the average spec needed to play Zoink’s games, since they would rather reach a broader audience instead.
“Not unless we have good reason to,” Fröhlander said. “The extra resources are cool to have and allows us to maybe do some platform specific enhancements, but in general we’d rather reach a wider audience than missing out on potential players due to system requirements.”
So, you know- we can keep fighting about the added pixels and lines that one of the two consoles may add over the other, but functionally, are the two really that different from one another?