As a PC enthusiast (love building high-end PCs but prefer playing on consoles) the thought of a 2013/2014 GPU using DDR3 baffles me, personally i think this is worse than any other crap Microsoft is trying to pull off.

Here are some specs:

Xbox One: 68GB/sec of main memory (8GB DDR3) bandwidth.

PS4: 176GB/sec of main memory (8GB GDDR5) bandwidth.

That's not the only difference between the two, the number of compute units plays a big factor, 12 for the Xbox and 18 for the PS4. The gap between both consoles is going to be big if not bigger considering that this time around the Sony console will have no drawbacks(performance wise).

Brad was saying on the bombcast that the xbox had a way of speeding up that bandwidth outside of just the ddr3 memory effectively putting them on par with sony and being more cost effective.

Tech speculation is tedious at this point in time without direct comparisons of games. This kind of willy waving is altogether pointless.

it has 32Mb of very fast SRAM on the graphics die, but still...

I'm not sure man - to me, Forza didn't look as good as Drive Club and nothing shown looked as good as Infamous (considering that's an open world game and was running in engine) and obviously Killzone (though I dont know who is still interested in that franchise).

COD looked like a current gen PC port with AA and slightly better models (and IMO looked worse than The Last Of Us, AA aside).

Hopefully MS wows us in 18 days.

Yeah, 12 compute units making up 768 shaders in total compared to the PS4's 18 compute units making up 1152 shader units.

However, I'm not sure we have seen any clock frequencies on either parties.Sony has claimed that their chip is capable of a 1,84 TFLOPs of computing power.

if... IF the xbone chip runs at the exact same frequency, it would be 33% weaker, but, I'm not sure we know that yet. they could up the frequency to make up for the smaller number of shaders.

@devildoll: Ok so if thats all true, would you still buy the ps4 if the price was say, $100 or so more than the xbox?

have you looked at the stills? or are you judging forza by the stream that had the quality of a early 2000's model cellphone camera?

I think that you are making two big mistakes here: first, you comparing these consoles to a PC when, despite what Sony and Microsoft may want you to believe, are still pretty far off what a high-end PC is. Let me remind you that the PS4 is using not a GPU, but an APU. Completely different rules apply to it when you don't have to deal with the CPU-Mobo-GPU interface and have both CPU and GPU on the same die (I don't know if Microsoft is using a dedicated GPU or an APU on their console, though). Second, you are giving this way, way too much thought. GDDR3 is not that uncommon in PC GPUs. Heck, basically the low-to-mid tier of GeForce 600 Series GPUs (and the vast majority of the 600M series) is still using GDDR3. And since the Xbox One and PS4 are on par with a mid-to-high-ish tier GPU, I guess it won't be a deal-breaker.

Remember when developers had to somehow code for the PS3's Cell and split RAM? And yet, they managed to provide games that were, basically, the same as their 360 counterparts. This is by no means the worst crap Microsoft is trying to pull off, because, in the end, it will make very little difference. You can't just look at the number after "GDDR" and assume that one shits all over the other. We know next to nothing about the Xbox One's graphic processing capabilities, so everything right now is pure (tiresome) speculation. Let third parties ship multiplatform games and then we'll see who outperforms who. But, right now, don't sweat it, man.

Also, PC MASTER RACE :P

18 days then you can start counting frames of actual games

Don't forget that only 5GB of the GDDR3 RAM accessible to games, and 3GB of RAM will be reserved for the OS. Compare this to Sony, who will allow their full 8GB of GDDR5 RAM to be used by games.

Actual Microsoft quote: "We purposefully did not target the highest end graphics. We targeted it more as a broad entertainment play."

https://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2013/05/21/interview-with-xbox-ones-chief-product-officer-marc-whitten.aspx RAM issue discussed at about 9:44 into the video.

Car games have had impressive sills for ages. I'm judging it by the trailer they released, in which everything but the cars themselves (which admittedly look great, but then they look just as good in DC) are the only impressive looking things in the game.

The environments, smoke effects, etc look pretty meh - I don't get the same meh feeling from Drive Club.

Looks better than GT6 though, no doubt. Both do.

But still , what? That's an honest question, by the way. I fully believe the PS4 is much more powerful, I'd just like explanations.

@randiolo: well, if the difference really is 33% and the multiplat developers actually do something useful with it, and games look decently superior on the ps4, then yeah i'd pay an extra hundred bucks in exchange for a better game experience across a whole console lifecycle.
then you have to take into account everything else in the ecosystem of course, like where your friends are, achievements etc.

@joeyravn

both systems are apu's from the details we have now, they have the same cpu at the same frequency, the xbone has lower specs on the gpu and slower unified memory.
unless you have to take the operating systems into account, the should be pretty similar to program for, I'm of course no game developer or console architect, so i wouldn't know for sure.

@spaceinsomniac im sure the PS4 has an operating system as well, and im sure they have to set aside some ram for it. just like they did on the ps3. question is how much.

@ez123 the ESRAM is still only at 102 GB/s , compared to the PS4's whole 8 GB @176 GB/s ,but there are other things to take into account as well, latency, time it takes to read or write, iops and stuff like that.

Effectively giving both systems the same sort of bandwidth but with the potential for the Xbox to offer lower latency. We can't know until the machines are in our hands but there's a real possibility that their performance will be very similar or that either machine could edge ahead under real-world conditions.

They are both using AMD APUs, Memory bandwidth is a huge factor when you are building an APU based system (i've build some), even though it is a low-end system it is smart to add high speed DDR3 (2400mhz) to get extra graphics performance from the chip, while when you are building an i5/i7(high-end system with discrete graphics) a mere 1600mhz ram would suffice.

The biggest difference for this Gen is that both consoles will be x86, no more Cell crap to get in the way of multiplatform development, that means the ports will be virtually identical and you'll witness the performance gap much like you would if you were to swap a 650 to a 670 on your gaming PC(not saying that the graphics performance of Xbox One and PS4 are equivalent to those cards, it is just an example).

Before the Xbox reveal I stumbled upon this interview with mark cerny where he talks about the technical details and design decisions behind PS4. Intrestingly at some point they were considering a similar solution with slower bandwidth and using a cache instead:

"One thing we could have done is drop it down to 128-bit bus, which would drop the bandwidth to 88 gigabytes per second, and then have eDRAM on chip to bring the performance back up again," said Cerny. While that solution initially looked appealing to the team due to its ease of manufacturability, it was abandoned thanks to the complexity it would add for developers. "We did not want to create some kind of puzzle that the development community would have to solve in order to create their games. And so we stayed true to the philosophy of unified memory."

@selfconfessedcynic: Like I said its very tedious, comparing completely different games is a terrible way to prove which console is more powerful. I'm far more interested in the Battlefield 4 direct comparisons we will get much later in the year. Also the consoles worth can only really be derived from the launch line up each console has.

Digital Foundry is the place you want to go.

In an interview with Gameinformer, one of the heads of Microsoft said the memory difference wasn't an issue because the XONE is a "balanced system". He also said putting entertainment options behind a pay wall makes that entertainment more "magical" so my guess is that he's full of shit.

@selfconfessedcynic: oh i see, i even found a 1,4 GB 1080p version of the trailer over at xbox's press site, now i just need to find something similar for drive club.

But yeah, they dont show any particularly impressive enviroments in that forza trailer.

@ez123: Both Devildolljgf and rebgav have answered your question.

@rebgav: your more or less saying that will happen next gen will be the same that happens this one. When a game is exclusive for a system it will look amazing. But when it's multi platform it will have pros and cons on both systems.

True, but 3 out of 8 really seems like a LOT to me. That's damn near half the RAM that will not and cannot be used for games. If the PS4 isn't designed to allow you to browse the internet as you play a game or watch a movie, and it's not designed to instantly switch between television and games, then I would imagine much more of the Xbox One's RAM will be reserved for non-gaming applications when compared to the PS4. I'll be looking forward to hearing about the overall final stats, but it's not looking good for the Xbox One at this point.

@randiolo: brad is no graphic engeneer, Its hard to know, until there is a few iteretaions with game engines how far would this hardware go.

Specs of the Xbone are disapointing to say the least. Im a pc gamer but slow mainstream consoles holding back visuals is a bummer