Yes, any console can output 1080p. However, for almost all of the multiplatform titles, the Xbox One wasn’t able to hit that same 1080p sweet spot like PS4. Anyway, the fact of the matter is, PlayStation’s DRM is negligible at best, while Xbox One puts it down your throat.

Funny…I own a computer consulting firm, have been working in the Information Technology field for twenty eight years, and you think that I don’t understand how computers work? I love your convoluted answer, but it isn’t going to make the XBox perform better than the PS4. It’s quite obvious that you are the one who doesn’t understand how PC’s work.

Other than the fact that some i5’s are faster than some i7’s because of differences in cores, hyperthreading and clock speeds? It’s how information is distributed, shuffled and processed. There’s many different flavors of hardware, designs and optimizations that cause systems to be good at particular things. It’s sad you own a pc without understanding this :-/

Sony has a rather large software division (although Microsoft’s has been around much longer). Microsoft is not flawless in that regard. I own a PC Consulting firm so I’ll be the first one to argue with you in regards to their current software being good. I could make the same argument in regards to Sony being a hardware company and Microsoft not. My business has been been booming thanks to Office 365 and Windows 8. The reason it’s booming is because of how flaky and unstable it is.

Any which way, I appreciate your insights and thoughts.

Game play is different from physics and what can be rendered on the screen; game mechanics, overall theme, thematic development, navigation through the environment, interactivity in the environment, etc. are part of gameplay, not how much physics and AI the system can handle. Even if that’s what made gameplay theoretically better, physics and AI are more CPU-intensive tasks, so the clock rate on the Xbox One is better suited since it’s a bit faster than the PS4 on that particular section of the APU. The PS4 may be able to more and slightly better looking eye candy, but so did the PS3; theoretical computing differences won’t be that a big deal when it comes to gameplay since most studios tend to focus on eye candy rather than engaging the audience. The game can look as pretty as you want, like Battlefield, but the game will still play like crap. I’d rather have a game that plays well and is engaging than something that looks pretty and is boring regardless of what gaming platform I’m on.

Microsoft is a software company; Sony is not. Saying that Microsoft does software better is not a stretch at all since that is Microsoft’s business primary model, and they’ve been doing it very well despite all the crap they get. Both consoles make the option available for dedicated servers in their respective cloud offerings; Azure is just easier to work with compared to OpenStack. Sony doesn’t do but a few pieces of software that are actually worth using, and those are only in areas where Adobe and Avid provide better solutions anyway.

I don’t see your logic. You aren’t tying power to how a game plays. Power of a system and how much it can balance has always had a tie to the amount of bots are handled within a game and affects all areas of physics, AI, etc.

Both Microsoft and Sony have new dedicated servers for their next gen consoles so what they’ve done before has no effect on what they’re doing now in the multi-player arena.

Your “tie” between Sony occasionally bricking a PS due to a bad update and Microsoft “doing software better” is an absolute stretch, if that. I could use the same logic and say Sony does hardware better because of all the XBox One’s that were returned.

Power has nothing to do with how well a game plays. Battlefield 4 still sucks on all platforms for the most part if I’m not mistaken. Call of Duty will continue to sell what basically has been the same multiplayer game since COD 4.EA Sports will continue to publish their sports titles that are basically the same since the 09 or 10 releases. Ubisoft will continue to write horribly optimized and glitched code regardless of what platform they develop for. Sony has enough exclusive franchises, Microsoft has enough exclusive franchises, each of which sells well to their target audiences. Power will have no effect on multiplayer gaming, especially when Microsoft has a cloud system that is a blank canvas for whatever the developer needs it to do. Microsoft’s one up on Sony is the fact that they know how to do software better, evidenced by the fact that no update I know of for the Xbox systems has bricked a console in the manner that Sony’s Playstation updates have on occasion.

Microsoft has been able to harness the “multi-player arena” better than Sony last round (more players/AI). Do you think that will change with the difference in power this round or do you think Microsoft will still dominate? Why?

While the Xbox One does feature a weaker 7700 series architecture and the PS4 has a 7800 series architecture on the APU, I don’t think the differences really will mean all that much in the end. Look at what was achieved when the Xbox 360 featured more GPU memory with direct access via eDRAM: PS3 was still able to optimize and produce better looking exclusive games, but the mutliplatform titles still performed largely the same. The GPU difference isn’t large enough to really “limit” the Xbox One to textures below 1080P given that eSRAM is a much better improvement to eDRAM and there’s more of it than what was in the Xbox One. The GPU difference is honestly blown way out of proportion, just like most of everything so far between the PS4 and Xbox One. I’m all for using free marketing driven off of negative press of your main competitor from a business perspective, but to make the argument that one is simply more powerful because of the number of GPU compute units available is sort of ridiculous due to other system design factors.

What are your feelings in regards to the GPU differences and how they affect the textures and other graphical elements?