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Sony’s PlayStation IV (see what we did there?) is the Death Star, slowly meandering its way towards Microsoft’s hidden base on its home planet. The superior hardware of the ‘Xbox One’ killer seems set to utterly destroy its target from the moment it leaves the hangar. Fortunately, Microsoft has a new hope. That new hope is a 6% increase in GPU clock speed.

Yes, the WiHD Rocks! campaign office has been abuzz with debate on horsepower differences between these two machines, so let’s take a look at what the wire is telling us so far.

Controversy on Which Is More Powerful

Depending on the website you choose to browse, you may find different results on which of these two machines win the battle. It certainly seems plain as day on paper that the PS4 is the obvious winner. However, legendary nerd and awesome tech genius, John Carmack, states that the two are very close indeed.

It should be pointed out that stage that no direct benchmark comparisons have been carried out so we’re still waiting on the ultra-concrete evidence, but it is a solid testimonial nonetheless.

On a side note, Carmack also said in the same presentation that Kinect was “kind of like a zero-button mouse with a lot of latency on it.” (lol) But let’s take a moment to look at how things stand on the aforementioned paper.

There Can Be Only One

So, the Xbox One has had its 800 MHz GPU core boosted to 853 MHz after Microsoft discovered it could crank up the chip without concerns over stability or overheating issues. This nudge in the right direction would mean the output of Microsoft’s boosted GPU stands at 1.33 TeraFLOPS/s, but this still leaves Sony a significant chunk ahead and capable of cranking 1.84 TeraFLOPS/s. A Nintendo Wii U? 0.352 TeraFLOPS/s…

Another metric to compare the graphics processors doing all this flopping around is shader cores. Microsoft’s chip sports 768 while inside the Sony GPU nestles a more generous 1,152. Readers with high-end gaming PCs may be scoffing right now about how their Radeon HD 7990 is clearly superior bit of hardware, boasting over 4,000 shader cores. While jibes that this graphics card cost in excess of $1,000 by itself may shut these people up temporarily, it’s only a matter of time before this price drops. That’s a story for another day…

Other core hardware comes in the form of the CPU where Microsoft is lagging behind once again. While both machines will have eight CPU cores, the similarities end there, with Microsoft’s set to be clocked at 1.6 GHz and Sony’s reported to be at 2.75 GHz (with recent news suggesting it may go even higher).

In Conclusion

If it wasn’t for the valueabled opinion of John Carmack, it would be easy to think that the PlayStation was about to wipe the floor with the next Xbox. Even then, this may still be the case and we certainly don’t have anything conclusive yet. The guys at Microsoft are clearly worried about the pending changes and, in the meantime, we’ll just have to wait for a little more news.