The Xbox One - Mini Review & Comparison to Xbox 360/PS4
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 20, 2013 8:00 AM ESTImage Quality - Xbox 360 vs. Xbox One
Before I get to the PS4 comparison, I wanted to start with some videos showcasing the improvement you can expect from launch day titles that are available on both the Xbox 360 and Xbox One. I turned to Call of Duty: Ghosts for this comparison as it’s broadly available on all platforms I’m comparing today.
Note that cross platform launch titles, particularly those available on previous generation consoles, end up being the worst examples of what’s possible on a next-generation platform. For the most part they’re optimized for the platform with the larger installed base (i.e. prior-gen hardware), and the visual uplift on new hardware isn’t as much as it could be. I’d say my subjective experience in playing a lot of the launch titles on Xbox One and PS4 mirrors this sentiment. Basic things like not having accurate/realistic cloth physics in games like CoD: Ghosts just screams port and not something that was designed specifically for these next gen systems. Just as we’ve seen in prior generations, it’s likely going to be a good 12 - 24 months before we see great examples of games on this new generation of hardware.
Now that I’ve adequately explained why this is a bad comparison, let’s get to the comparison. I’ve captured HDMI output on both consoles. They were both set to full range (0-255), however I had issues with the Xbox One respecting this setting for some reason. That combined with differences across Ghosts on both platforms left me with black levels that don’t seem equalized between the platforms. If you can ignore that, we can get to the comparison at hand.
All of these videos are encoded at 4K, with two 1080p captures placed side by side. Be sure to select the highest quality playback option YouTube offers.
The first scene is the intro to Ghosts. Here you can see clear differences in lighting, details in the characters, as well as some basic resolution/AA differences as well (Xbox 360 image sample, Xbox One image sample).
The second scene is best described as Call of Duty meets Gravity. Here the scene is going by pretty quickly so you’re going to have to pause the video to get a good feel for any differences in the platforms. What’s most apparent here though is the fact that many present day users can likely get by sticking with older hardware due to the lack of titles that are truly optimized for the Xbox One/PS4.
Now getting to scenes more representative of actual gameplay, we have Riley riding around wanting badly to drive the military vehicle. Here the differences are huge. The Xbox One features more realistic lighting, you can see texture in Riley’s fur, shadows are more detailed and there seems to be a resolution/AA advantage as well. What’s funny is that although the Xbox One appears to have a resolution advantage, the 360 appears to have less aliasing as everything is just so blurry.
Speaking of aliasing, we have our final IQ test which is really the perfect test case for high resolution/AA. Once again we see a completely different scene comparing the Xbox One to Xbox 360. Completely different lighting, much more detail in the environments as well as objects on the ground. The 360 version of Ghosts is just significantly more blurry than what you get on the One, which unfortunately makes aliasing stand out even more on the One.
Even though it’ll be a little while before we get truly optimzed next-gen titles, there’s an appreciable improvement on those games we have today for anyone upgrading from an older console. The difference may be more subtle than in previous generations, but it’s there.
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Flunk - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link
That's intensely stupid, you're saying that because something is traditional it has to be better. That's a silly argument, not only that it's not even true. The consoles you mentioned all have embedded RAM but all the others from the same generations don't.At this point, arguing that the Xbox One is more powerful or even equivalently powerful is just trolling. The Xbox One and PS4 have very similar hardware, the PS4 just has more GPU units and a higher-performing memory subsystem.
4thetimebeen - Saturday, November 23, 2013 - link
Flunk right now if your saying that the PS4 is more powerful then obviously you base your info in current spec sheet tech and not on the architectural design, but what you don't understand is what's underlining all that new architectural design that has to be learned at the same time it's been used, will only improve exponentially in the future. The PS4 it's straight forward a PC machine with a little mod in the CPU to take better advantage of the GPU but it's pretty much straight forward old design or better said "current architecture GPU design". Which is the reason many say it's easier to program than the Xbox One but right now that "weaker system that you so much swear and affirm is the Xbox One " has a couple game that have been pretty much design for it from the ground up been claim to be the most technical looking advance games on the market right now and you can guess which I'm talking about, that not even that I house 1st party game from Sony can't even compete in looks "KSF". I'm not saying that it's not awesome looking, it is actually but even compared to crisis3 it fails in comparison to that game. So it's suppose to be more easier to develop for, it's suppose to be more powerful and called a super computer, but when looking for that power gap in 1st party games that had the time to invest in its power, the "weaker system" with the hardest to develop architecture show a couple of games that trounces what the "superior machine" was able to show. Hmmm hopefully for you, time will tell and the games will tell the whole story!Owls - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link
Calling people names? Haha. How utterly silly for you to say the two different RAM types can be added for a total of 274GB/s. Hey guys it looks like I now have 14400 RPM hard drives now too!smartypnt4 - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link
Traditional cache-based architectures rely on all requests being serviced by the cache. This is slightly different, though. I'd be wary of adding both together, as there's no evidence that the SoC is capable of simultaneously servicing requests to both main memory and the eSRAM in parallel. Microsoft's marketing machine adds them together, but the marketing team doesn't know what the hell it's talking about. I'd wait for someone to reverse engineer exactly how this thing works before saying one way or the other, I suppose.It's entirely possible that Microsoft decided to let the eSRAM and main memory be accessed in parallel, but I kind of doubt it. There'd be so little return on the investment required to get that to work properly that it's not really worth the effort. I think it's far more likely that all memory requests get serviced as usual, but if the address is inside a certain range, the access is thrown at the eSRAM instead of the main memory. In this case, it'd be as dumb to add the two together as it would be to add cache bandwidth in a consumer processor like an i5/i7 to the bandwidth from main memory. But I don't know anything for sure, so I guess I can't say you don't get it (since no one currently knows how the memory controller is architected).
hoboville - Thursday, November 21, 2013 - link
smartypnt4's description of eSRAM is very much how typical cache works in a PC, such as L1, L2, L3. It should also be mentioned that L2 cache is almost always SRAM. Invariably, this architecture is just like typical CPU architecture, because that's what AMD Jaguar is. Calls to cache that aren't in the cache address range get forwarded to the SDRAM controller. There is no way Microsoft redesigned the memory controller. That would require changing the base architecture of the APU.Parallel RAM access only exists in systems where there is more than one memory controller or the memory controller is spanned across multiple channels. People who start adding bandwidth together don't understand computer architectures. These APUs are based on existing x86 architectures, with some improvements (look up AMD Trinity). These APUs are not like the previous gen which used IMB POWER cores which are largely different.
rarson - Saturday, November 23, 2013 - link
But Microsoft's chip isn't an APU, it's an SoC. There's silicon on the chip that isn't at all part of the Jaguar architecture. The 32 MB of eSRAM is not L2, Jaguar only supports L2 up to 2 MB per four cores. So it's not "just like a typical CPU architecture."What the hell does Trinity have to do with any of this? Jaguar has nothing to do with Trinity.
4thetimebeen - Saturday, November 23, 2013 - link
Actually if you read and I apologized for up butting in but if you read the digital foundry interview of the Microsoft Xbox One architects that they heavily modified that GPU and it is a DUAL PIPELINE GPU! So your theory is not really far away from the truth!The interview,
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-t...
4thetimebeen - Saturday, November 23, 2013 - link
Plus to add; the idea of adding that DDR3 to the eSRAM kind of acceptable because unlike the PS4 simple straight architecture design like very much the One pool GDDR5 you have 4 modules of DDR3 running at 60- 65gb/s and they each can be used for specific simultaneous request which makes it a lot more advance and more like a future DDR4 way of behaving plus killing that bottleneck people that don't understand, think it has. It's a new tech people and it will take some time to learn its advantages but not hard to program. It's a system design to have less error and be more effective and perform way better than supposedly higher flops GPUS cause it can achieve same performance with less resources! Hope you guys can understand a little and not trying to offend anyone!melgross - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link
You really don't understand this at all, do you?fourthletter - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link
All the other consoles you mentioned (apart from the PS2) are based on IBM Power PC chips, you are comparing their setup to X86 on the new consoles - silly boy.