The Xbox One - Mini Review & Comparison to Xbox 360/PS4
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 20, 2013 8:00 AM ESTImage Quality - Xbox One vs. PlayStation 4
This is the big one. We’ve already established that the PS4 has more GPU performance under the hood, but how does that delta manifest in games? My guess is we’re going to see two different situations. The first being what we have here today. For the most part I haven’t noticed huge differences in frame rate between Xbox One and PS4 versions of the same game, but I have noticed appreciable differences in resolution/AA. This could very well be the One’s ROP limitations coming into play. Quality per pixel seems roughly equivalent across consoles, the PS4 just has an easier time delivering more of those pixels.
The second situation could be one where an eager developer puts the PS4’s hardware to use and creates a game that doesn’t scale (exclusively) in resolution, but also in other aspects of image quality as well. My guess is the types of titles to fall into this second category will end up being PS4 exclusives (e.g. Uncharted 4) rather than something that’s cross-platform. There’s little motivation for a cross-platform developer to spend a substantial amount of time in optimizing for one console.
Call of Duty: Ghosts
Let’s start out with Call of Duty: Ghosts. Here I’m going to focus on two scenes: what we’ve been calling internally Let the Dog Drive, and the aliasing test. Once again I wasn’t able to completely normalize black levels across both consoles in Ghosts for some reason.
In motion both consoles look pretty good. You really start to see the PS4’s resolution/AA advantages at the very end of the sequence though (PS4 image sample, Xbox One image sample). The difference between these two obviously isn’t as great as from the 360 to Xbox One, but there is a definite resolution advantage to the PS4. It’s even more obvious if you look at our aliasing test:
Image quality otherwise looks comparable between the two consoles.
NBA 2K14
NBA 2K14 is one cross platform title where I swear I could sense slight frame rate differences between the two consoles (during high quality replays) but it’s not something I managed to capture on video. Once again we find ourselves in a situation where there is a difference in resolution and/or AA levels between the Xbox One and PS4 versions of the game.
Both versions look great. I’m not sure how much of this is the next-gen consoles since the last time I played an NBA 2K game was back when I was in college, but man have console basketball games significantly improved in their realism over the past decade. On a side note, NBA 2K14 does seem to make good use of the impulse triggers on the Xbox One’s controller.
Battlefield 4
I grabbed a couple of scenes from early on in Battlefield 4. Once again the differences here are almost entirely limited to the amount of aliasing in the scene as far as I can tell. The Xbox One version is definitely more distracting. In practice I notice the difference in resolution, but it’s never enough to force me to pick one platform over another. I’m personally more comfortable with the Xbox One’s controller than the PS4’s, which makes for an interesting set of tradeoffs.
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Sabresiberian - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link
Sorry about the emotion in the last paragraph, but it irritates me that some console players have to make up excuses for their decision. If you decide to buy a console, that's all good, but don't cut your nose off to spite yourself by purchasing one for reasons that simply aren't true.Sabresiberian - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link
"yourself" is a typo, should be "your face". :)PliotronX - Thursday, November 21, 2013 - link
That's very true, but then they've always lagged PC gaming. The closed proprietary system is a double edged sword. SDKs designed for a specific system can eek every last drop out of said system but then it's basically set in stone. I honestly don't think most peoples eyes are attune to the blur without GSync but they will notice true 1080p gaming. They all (PC, PS4, Xbone) all still serve their roles. Xbone just happens to veer off into Netflix territory a little too hard.ydeer - Thursday, November 21, 2013 - link
I agree, I’m not as excited about consoles as I used to be. What I am really excited about is SteamOS.Most reasonably priced gaming PCs have the potential to compete with this generation of consoles if Valve (somehow, magically) manages to bring down the overhead using Linux.
Plus you get the community. And a controller that at least has the potential to work better than anything we have used so far (see Civ5 on Steam Controller demo). And holiday sales. Upgradable hardware.
Heck, I can even see myself dual booting SteamOS on a MBP with the Steam Controller to play the latest and greatest games at almost equal quality than "next-gen" consoles, but completely mobile.
Please Valve, don't mess this up.
Wall Street - Thursday, November 21, 2013 - link
First off, 1440p, G-Sync and 120 Hz are all technologies that cost $250+ for the monitor alone and really demand another $300 on the GPU, so they are not comparable to the PS4 or XBox.Secondly, how can you build a gaming rig for $500? $100 is the Windows license. Another $100 gets a PSU, a case and a Blu-ray drive (but a really cheap case and PSU). Another $100 needs to be spent for a HDD and RAM. Now we are at $300 and don'y have a Mobo, CPU or RAM. A good CPU and CPU cooler costs $150, even for a cheaper CPU (with a stock cooler, the console would be much quieter than the desktop). At least $50 needs to be spent on a Mobo. This leaves you with only $50 on your $500 budget for a GPU. As you can see, this leaves you with a system that underperforms the consoles. I would also argue that a $500 system needs to cheap out on components leaving you with worse build quality than a console which is more similar to a premium SFF PC (which cost a premium to full sized). Also, this cost analysis doesn't have a monitor or peripherals, so if you don't have a PC or have a laptop, that is at least another $150 (many more people have TVs, and fewer people have monitors sitting around now that laptops have been a majority of PC sales over the past five years).
Hixbot - Sunday, November 24, 2013 - link
PC gaming is superior, but as long as developers leave out the local multiplayer elements of their console counterpart, a console will always have a spot in my home. You know, gaming in the living room with actual friends. I'd hook up my gaming PC to my TV and get some controllers, but there are basically no PC games that offer any decent local multiplayer options.mikato - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link
They do but you need to have all the computers in the same room. Pain in the butt, but we do it a couple times a year.Lonesloane - Thursday, November 21, 2013 - link
What about the noise of both new consoles? Anand is not commenting on that in the article, but after my experience with a Xenon 360 this is really important to me.Could you add that information?
JimmiG - Thursday, November 21, 2013 - link
It's funny how PC hardware reviews obsess over tiny differences in memory bandwidth, shader throughput and clock speeds, yet the PS4 having 40% greater shader throughput and 160% more memory bandwidth just doesn't seem to matter...blzd - Thursday, November 21, 2013 - link
Did you read the article? It was pretty clear and even pointed out to make real world differences. Maybe you thought theyd outright denounce the xb1 for it?