With Sony and Microsoft both looking at launching iterative upgrades on their respective consoles with the PS4 NEO and the Xbox One Scorpio respectively, a new paradigm of console game development is now set to come into play, as the age old notion of console generations begins to blur into a more continuous hardware platform for developers to target.
But that’s not the only change that the PS4 NEO and Xbox One Scorpio will bring to the table, either- you see, with the PS4 NEO being a more conservative upgrade, and Microsoft going all out with the Scorpio, the tables will turn, and Xbox will now be the more powerful platform over PlayStation.
That was the question we decided to ask David Martha of Neocore Games, who has worked on Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr- will the launch of these new consoles give Microsoft a leg up in the graphics and resolution wars that they have been losing ever since the Xbox One and PS4 first launched in 2013?
“At the moment we’d rather refrain from any comparisons between the NEO and the Scorpion,” Martha said. “Each of them is a unique hardware with its distinctive software environment and we are happy to work with both.
He went on to explain that there would be other factors that would define how good (or not) a game went on to look on the PS4 NEO and the Xbox One Scorpio, beyond just their hardware.
“Surely there will be games performing better on NEO, other games would favor the Scorpion, but the bottlenecks are always different during each and every development. Development teams sometimes prefer working on one particular platform or they have more experience with the other, which means that this is a very complex process where the hardware is the foundation of the project, but there are numerous others factors in play as well.”
It actually sounds like a very reasonable answer to me- though of course, software and optimization solutions can only go so far to compensate for a gap in pure hardware power. Just ask Microsoft and the Xbox One, and all the various fixes they’ve tried to bridge the difference and lead the PS4 has over them!
But until we know for sure what the PS4 NEO is, and can thus make an informed assessment on the matter? Any comparison will be, at best, speculative. It’s best to wait until we have more information on hand.