Everyone, more or less knows the PS4 has better hardware than the Xbox One due to its GDDR5 memory architecture. The Xbox One on the other hand has a DDR3 architecture which is coupled with eSRAM. Having said that does the slower DDR3 in the Xbox One is somewhat compensated by it’s fast eSRAM?
“That depends on who you talk to. In my personal opinion the eSRAM does not quite make up for it but it makes it really close,” Stardock CEO Brad Wardell said to GamingBolt in a recent interview. However he believes that the PS4 is a better hardware given that the console has more compute units compared to the Xbox One. “The real problem is that the Xbox One only has 12 what you would call cores on their GPU and I think the PlayStation 4 has around 18. The hardware on the PlayStation 4 in my opinion is better than the hardware on the Xbox One.”
However it’s a give and take situation as the software on the PS4 isn’t as sophisticated as the Xbox One. “In my opinion, the software on the PlayStation 4 is crummy compared to the software on the…you know it’s like take your pick, right. I shouldn’t say crummy but it’s not as sophisticated as what it is on the Xbox One.”
“So you end up in an impractical manner with games that are going to be of a similar capability. I’d rather write for Windows, as an example I’d rather write for Windows than Micro Controller (laughs) or something where I have to know things that are a little less standard or a little more arcane. Of course what’s arcane is always a matter of where you’re sitting though. As a Windows developer I find the Xbox One more familiar to me, whereas if you’re a Linux developer you might find the PlayStation 4 a little more familiar. That’s just an example.”
So will the graphics difference between the PS4 and Xbox One become trivial, as DX12 is adopted by more developers as time goes on?
“Yeah. I mean to the people who are really hardcore they’re always going to find a difference in it, to the average person they’re not going to notice a difference. That’s why when I see these people battling on Twitter about, even as is, I understand the differences but I can’t really tell much difference between the two. ”
On a related note, Brad Wardell and his team of talented developers and artists are working on Ashes of Singularity which by all means is looking amazing. We recently went behind the technology powering the game which you can read up here.