The Xbox One - Mini Review & Comparison to Xbox 360/PS4
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 20, 2013 8:00 AM ESTFinal Words
More so than last time, it seems like this next generation of console wars will boil down to a few key questions: exclusives, online, extra features and personal preference.
If there’s an exclusive IP that you will sink a ton of time into, the rest really doesn’t matter. For Microsoft that could be Halo, for Sony that could be Uncharted. I feel like Microsoft might have the stronger lineup out of the gate this generation, but that’s not saying much as neither platform appears to have anything that’s a must have at this point. I can’t help but wonder how different this launch would’ve been had there been a Halo 5 or Uncharted 4 (or Last of Us 2) available on day one.
The online story is going to take some time to flesh out. Microsoft held the clear advantage there last generation for online multiplayer, but Sony is intent on closing the gap this round. I’m going to say it’s still wait and see on this one as neither console is going to have enough users to make for a great online experience for a while to come.
In the extra features category, Microsoft is really hoping to win users over with things like their TV integration and Kinect. I couldn’t be further from the right demographic to talk about the former so I’m going to avoid saying much there. On the Kinect front, I know people who are interested in the Xbox One solely because of Kinect. I’m not one of those people but I can definitely see the appeal there. If Sony’s price tag didn’t nerf the PS3 last round, it’s entirely possible that Microsoft’s Kinect bundle and resulting price hike won’t do the same for the Xbox One this time.
Finally, there’s an element of personal preference in all of this. Look, feel, ecosystem, company loyalty all fall into this category. There are also things like controller preference that fit here as well. I can’t help much in this department.
If you’re looking at the Xbox One as a successor to the Xbox 360, I think you’ll be very pleased. It’s a much better console in every way and a long overdue upgrade.
It's interesting to me that the performance/image quality differences that exist between the Xbox One and PS4 ultimately boil down to a difference in memory interface rather than an interest in optimizing down silicon cost. In this case Microsoft has the bigger die, but the smaller GPU in order to accommodate enough eSRAM to offset the use of DDR3 memory.
If all you play are cross-platform games, then the PS4 will give you better looking titles at a lower console cost. For those of you that are particularly bothered by aliasing, the PS4 will definitely reduce (not eliminate) that. However I would argue that if all you play are cross-platform games then you might want to look into buying/building a PC instead. I’m also unsure about how much cross shopping actually happens between these two platforms. I can understand for first time gamers (e.g. parents buying the first console for their kids), but otherwise I feel like your friend group and prior experience is going to ultimately determine whether you end up with a Xbox One or PS4.
I need a Halo box, but I also like to play Uncharted. Unfortunately I don’t know that there’s a good recommendation one way or another, other than to wait for a bit. Being an early adopter of a next-gen console is rarely a fun thing. Literally all of my friends are on Xbox 360s or PS3s, meaning online multiplayer with people I know is pretty much out of the question for at least a year or so. The launch lineup for both platforms is reasonable but could be a lot better. Having just played Grand Theft Auto V and the Last of Us, I’m going to need more than CoD or NBA 2K14 to really draw me in to the Xbox One or PS4. This is how the story goes with any new console launch.
One thing is for sure - this generation was long overdue. I remember being at E3 in 2005 and wondering what the Xbox 360 and PS3 would do to the future of PC gaming given how well specced both systems were. This time around I’m less concerned. Everyone seems to have gone more conservative with GPU choices, even though the resulting APUs are anything but small. If anything the arrival of both consoles, targeted the way they are, is likely going to make things better industry wide. As both sell in good quantities we’ll see developers target a higher class of system, which will be good for everyone.
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kyuu - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link
I don't care. Why should I? The only thing that goes on in my living room is playing games and watching TV. So even in the unlikely event that the Kinect camera is feeding somebody (NSA? Microsoft interns? Who exactly am I supposed to be afraid of again?) a 24/7 feed of my living room and somebody is actually looking at it, big whoop.I'm not planning on purchasing either console, btw. Just irritated by the tin-foil hat brigade pretending it's reasonable to be scared by the Kinect.
kyuu - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link
Oh, and not to mention that if that is actually taking place, it'll be found out pretty quickly and there'll be a huge backlash against Microsoft. The huge potential for negative press and lost sales for absolutely no gain makes me pretty sure it's not going on, though.prophet001 - Thursday, November 21, 2013 - link
How sad.Microsoft, Google, Sony, and any other corporation out there has absolutely zero right to my privacy. Whether I am or am not doing anything "wrong." You my friend will not know what you've lost until it is truly gone.
mikato - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
I don't think it will be a problem (see kyuu), but I really disagree with your "nothing to hide" attitude.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argum...
Floew - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link
I recently build a Steam box. With a 360 controller/wireless adapter and Steam Big Picture set to launch on startup, it's a surprisingly console-like experience. Works much better than I had expected, frankly. My motivation to plunk down cash for the new consoles is now very low.Quidam67 - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link
Anand, just wondering if the Xbox One controller works with a Windows based PC (as per the 360 controller)? Would be great if you could try that out and let us know :)The Von Matrices - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link
The wireless XBOX 360 controller required a special USB receiver to work with a PC, and that took a few years to be released. I don't know if XBOX One controllers are compatible with the 360 wireless controller receiver or if a new one is required. I actually liked the wired XBOX 360 controller for certain PC games, and I'm curious to know if Microsoft will make wired XBOX One controllers.Quidam67 - Sunday, November 24, 2013 - link
Targetted to work with PC in 2014 apparently http://www.polygon.com/2013/8/12/4615454/xbox-one-...errorr - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link
There is a lot of discussion about the memory bandwidth issues but what I want to know is how latency affects the performance picture. That SRAM latency might be an order of magnitude quicker even if it is small. What workloads are more latency dependant to where the Xbox design might have a performance advantage?khanov - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link
It is important to understand that GPUs work in a fundamentally different way to CPUs. The main difference when it comes to memory access is how they deal with latency.CPUs require cache to hide memory access latency. If the required instructions/data are not in cache there is a large latency penalty and the CPU core sits there doing nothing useful for hundreds of clock cycles. For this reason CPU designers pay close attention to cache size and design to ensure that cache hit rates stay north of 99% (on any modern CPU).
GPUs do it differently. Any modern GPU has many thousands of threads in flight at once (even if it has, for example, only 512 shader cores) . When a memory access is needed, it is queued up and attended to by the memory controller in a timely fashion, but there is still the latency of hundreds of clock cycles to consider. So what the GPU does is switch to a different group of threads and process those other threads while it waits for the memory access to complete.
In fact, whenever the needed data is not available, the GPU will switch thread groups so that it can continue to do useful work. If you consider that any given frame of a game contains millions of pixels, and that GPU calculations need to be performed for each and every pixel, then you can see how there would almost always be more threads waiting to switch over to. By switching threads instead of waiting and doing nothing, GPUs effectively hide memory latency very well. But they do it in a completely different way to a CPU.
Because a GPU has many thousands of threads in flight at once, and each thread group is likely at some point to require some data fetched from memory, the memory bandwidth becomes a much more important factor than memory latency. Latency can be hidden by switching thread groups, but bandwidth constraints limit the overall amount of data that can be processed by the GPU per frame.
This is, in a nutshell, why all modern pc graphics cards at the mid and high end use GDDR5 on a wide bus. Bandwidth is king for a GPU.
The Xbox One attempts to offset some of its apparent lack of memory bandwidth by storing frequently used buffers in eSRAM. The eSRAM has a fairly high effective bandwidth, but its size is small. It still remains to be seen how effectively it can be used by talented developers. But you should not worry about its latency. Latency is really not important to the GPU.
I hope this helps you to understand why everyone goes on and on about bandwidth. Sorry if it is a little long-winded.