Eurogamer has what looks like a pretty in-depth and well researched article on the specs.

One of the more interesting bits in the aricle:

"In terms of the GPU hardware, hard information was difficult to come by, but one of the engineers did let slip with a significant stat - 768 operations per clock. We know that both Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are based on Radeon GCN architecture and we also know that each compute unit is capable of 64 operations per clock. So, again through a process of extrapolation from the drip-feed of hard facts, the make-up of the One's GPU is confirmed - 12 compute units each capable of 64 ops/clock gives us the 768 total revealed by Microsoft and thus, by extension, the 1.2 teraflop graphics core. So that's another tick on the Durango leaked spec that has been transposed across to the final Xbox One architecture and the proof we need that PlayStation 4's 18 CU graphics core has 50 per cent more raw power than the GPU in the new Microsoft console."

50% more powerful GPU (still a rumour, but stronger now) in combination with GDDR5 > DDR3 makes me wonder how the two consoles will compare price-wise.

You should not forget Kinect is expensive with a 1080P camera.

Also:

Another thing we could see a 60 to 30 FPS difference in some games.

Ps4 50% more powerful you say?

@zels: No matter what Sony puts in that box, they will never (again) come to market with a console that is hundreds of dollars more expensive than their competitor. It crippled the PS3 right out the gate, and they can't afford to fuck up again with this new generation. If I had to bet on it, I think that they will wait for Microsoft to announce price and then announce a SKU that is the exact same price.

So do we have anything official outside of the transistors and 64 bit thing? I kinda tuned out the show half way through.

I heard on Podcast Beyond that Sony doesn't expect to sell the PS4 at a loss because the hardware being used isn't prepriotary. So if they got a good deal on those hardware relationships the price could be relatively low. If not...oh boy.

Not everything is in that chart. Don't forget sony has that additional arm processor to handle background downloading/system turned off and still downloading.

Also there was the rumour that microsoft had an additional cpu to handle audio processing. However it is not visible on those wired motherboard pictures. Nor is it possible for it to be on the silicon directly. So i guess that rumour is a bust.

Microsoft has a significant bottleneck between the ddr3 and the embedded esram. Sony will continue to pull ahead and within a few years the gap will be large. Microsoft gambled big on sony only having 4gb of ddr5 and microsoft have lost massively. Sony will however take a kicking on the cost. But that will come down over the life of the generation.

Don't forget the rumour that the os's and kinect are gobbling upto 3gb of that ddr3 as well. Microsoft are completely gimping multiplatform games with this inneficient piece of shit. As gamers we must not support it.

Even then those are meaningless. Many versions of the Nvidia 680 probably has 3 billion transistors while the Intel I7 has around 1.75 billion. I'm not inclined to suggest either are more powerful than the other since neither are really comparable.

The audio CPU is supposed to be in the Kinect, purely for voice recog.

I don't think which is powerful will matter. The 360 set the standard this generation because it's what was the least powerful of the two. It sounds like this might happen again. Only a handful of PS3 games actually used its power to make really stunning games that the 360 wouldn't be able to handle.

I guess that's a good thing for PS4 exclusives though.

But the the impenetrable architecture on PS3 was one of the main reason why the 360 was the lead platform on almost everything. Now that the PS4 is as easy to work on as a PC, and is more powerful, it maybe the lead platform with the Xone getting ports.

Yeah, hopefully. The PS4 just seems better all around! What is Microsoft thinking with these specs...

Exactly, that's what people don't seem to realize. The hardware is much easier to develop for this time around.

I was already leaning slightly toward the PS4 due to the GDDR5 but man, if it has a more powerful GPU on top of that my choice is all but made. It's obviously not just about raw power but bottlenecks and development difficulty as well, and it looks like PS4 is better than Xbox One in all three regards.

E3 is going to be very interesting.

I'm a little worried that the Xbone is gonna be way cheaper and destroy the PS4 out of the gate. There isn't really anything in it that should make it really expensive.

Perhaps, but I wonder if they gimped the hardware in order to be able to put a Kinect in every box? Who knows.

@skytylz: Well, the Kinect might make it fairly expensive. Plus you'll probably have to pay for XBL Gold to access most of the features.

I wonder if PS4 will move to subscription-based online play?

Those costs are probably the reason why Microsoft is toying with the idea of a subsidy system. $300 with a $10 a month with a 2 year contract might be reasonable if they packed a bunch of hardware inside.

Have to say, my feeling going into this was that if one company did go significantly more powerful than the other then they'd only end up suffering because of that. Just by virtue of forcing the price too high and not ending up with much to show for it, due to multi-plats still being hamstrung by whatever the weaker console can achieve. As mentioned above though, I suppose the Kinect being included will help to balance things out price wise.

I don't think Sony can afford PS4 to be more expensive than X1, even if they do have to take a hit on the console to make that happen. Assuming the prices are the same, and it's effectively a straight choice between having Kinect or having a more powerful console... well, it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. I know which one I'd choose.

I'm unfamiliar with all this lingo, but are either of these consoles better than a PC with a GTX 570 in SLI? I hope I don't have to upgrade just yet.

Good read but I always laugh when someone says X% stronger or 10x more powerful than last gen. That's the worst way to quantify any kind of hardware power.

I would seriously be surprised if Sony could even come close to breaking even on this thing at launch. They are going for premium parts, more so than MS and both manufacturers have peripheral camera shit alongside the console. The potential for making money on the tech later in the generation will be huge though because the costs of making what are essentially PC's will drop a whole lot faster than with custom hardware. It's why the PS3 and 360 are still at the same price point for the longest time.

Has system 'power' ever mattered when it comes to game consoles?

Let the Sony fanboys play with slow ass games. Sure they might have a little bit sharper textures, but the games will be slower. GT7 will probably only let cars go at like 90 mph where as the Xone can get Forza cars to 200 mph. because while the PS4 has a beefier GPU, the Xbox One has Blast Processing built into it.

Seriously though, I think its too early to tell what will happen because of the spec differences.

It will be about developer tools and support. Indie complaints aside, MS is known for having pretty good dev tools. Sony's track record besides internal studios is not so good. And many speculate that this xbox is running a windows kernel with layering, porting PC games back and forth should be easier than ever.

I know nothing of these transistors or jiggawatts, but I'm certain that games on the Xbox One and PS4 will look about the same.

I wonder how much of the system memory that fancy Xbone switching OS is going to use, not to mention the new Kinect...

I think it's more like the 360 set the standard because getting that extra power from the PS3 was a bitch and not worth developers time (and I've spoken to programmers for multiplatform games first hand).

Here, both consoles are using traditional architecture, and while all of this isn't solid info yet the PS4 really seems the better machine - for gamers and developers.

This isn't necessarily accurate, just because they changed the hardware architecture doesn't mean their developer kits will be any easier to use, they probably will be based on their presentation, but they won't be as good as what Microsoft makes available, Microsoft has been developing DirectX forever, it's the PC standard and what Xbox/360/and X1 all use, a developer transitioning from 360 to X1 will have a much easier time than anyone learning whatever PS4's brand new kit is. I'm cheering for PS4 but X1 does still have some advantages going for it.

Nooope. 360 ruled because it used smarter and more familiar architecture, and hence pretty much all multiplatform games ran better on Xbox than on PS3, which was notoriously hard to work on. PS3 also had less memory overall, which was a further bottleneck. Now that both consoles have very similar architecture, but supposedly are quite disparate in computing power (PS4 is apparently estimated to deliver a 50% higher performance), games will very likely run better on PS4. From looking better, to significant differences in framerate.

Games scale with processing power. On familiar and comparable architecture as we have it now, there's nothing theoretical about PS4's advantage in this regard. It will translate into significantly better running games. At least if the current speculations are true. Seeing how Microsoft was extremely vague about what's in its box, a betting man would say it's true.

If true, then it's settled. I'll make Playstation 4 my mainstay in gaming. Just need to know the SKUs and the pricing and I'll place my preorder.

The PS4 is very probable the faster of the two, but the Xbox One is not bad either. I think we already hit the point of diminishing returns (for 1080p resolution at least). As it has been already said you can't simply compare the bandwidth, because Xbox One has an additional cache that the PS4 does not have. So the difference is not like 2x faster, more like 30% faster I would guess. The biggest difference is that the available memory is almost doubled in the PS4, so you may get higher resolution textures, perhaps addional textures and less popin. But we are talking about a very high level of visual detail here, so in game you most likely wont notice it that much.

We will get very nice looking games for both systems - thats for sure.

Ever played a Bethesda or an early Unreal 3 engine game on PS3? Pretty much every 3rd party game looks and runs worse on PS3 to this day, albeit the differences are mostly neglectable now. System specs do matter. The more elegant, more effectively powerful, and easy to work on system will have better running game. That's how it matters.

Playstation 3 was so crazy alien in design, I imagine it was like trying to code in Kanji speaking only English natively at first.

Think about the future. Launch title multiplatform games might look the same with both consoles now, but developers will get more familiar with the consoles over time and squeeze everything out of them. If the other console is more powerful, then in five years more demanding games will run a lot better with the more powerful one. Remember how Brad was badmouthing consoles during the Far Cry 3 quick look? Imagine that but add the more powerful console next to PC while Brad talks shit about the slower one.

Ever since the PS3, Sony have tried to make their platforms much easier to develop for, and after quite a few developers have mentioned that the Vita is super easy to delevop for, I don't think Xbox will have the advantage when it comes to dev tools anymore.

No the x-box one doesn't have an additional cache. They had to gimp their GPU and add 32mb of embedded esram to feed data faster (but still slower than the ps4) to the GPU and cpu. This is because the ddr3 ram is too slow to feed directly. So the ddr3 feeds into the esram which then feeds the cpu and gpu. The ps4 doesn't have this problem because the throughput of the gddr5 is insane. So it feeds directly to the cpu and gpu. This has given the ps4 a much cleaner and efficient silicon design. Enabling them to have 6 extra compute units. Thats 50% more power, getting data at about 30% faster rate.

Its also worth noting that even if the PS4 just gets XONE ports that will run and look at least as well as the XONE versions since the hardware for the PS4 isn't like somebody at vomited a broken budget computer into a plastic box.

The PS3 was a mess and so the ports looked and (more importantly) ran terrible until the last couple years. Since the PS4 isn't so weird we won't see another skyrim-job. Hopefully.

@paulwade The addition of another stop to get on and off the esram may add a small amount of latency as well.

@zoozilla: I don't think paying for gold will cross the average consumers mind when buying a console. However, I didn't really think about the price of Kinect driving up it's price. I wouldn't be surprised if the PS4 includes whatever it's camera thing is called.

@andorski: from now on all tech terms must be referenced to as jigawats.

So how would you call a small amount of faster storage between a large relatively slow storage and the component? For me it is a cache.

PS4 is sounding more appealing to me. Probably will get one at some point. E3 will help me decide what im going to do here a bit early to jumb on any wagon yet.

Yes but you were using cache in the positive sense. This is a workaround solution to slow ram which is an overall negative to smart design.

It will matter much more this generation since everything now runs on the same technology. If one console is significantly better then every game on that console will most likely perform way better too, not just special cases like we've seen with Sony this generation. The example Jonathan Blow presents could very easily become a reality, and while it won't mean MS will go under or anything they will lose quite a good chunk of software sales since people who own both consoles will lean harder towards PS4 versions.

Not just memory either, with the way they've built the machine there will even be pre-allocated CPU power that's unavailable for games. While it might not be something massive, the fact that they're running a secondary virtual machine will cut into every bit of performance.

I'm pretty sure that Sony can afford to put more into their console and compete at the same price point, because their doesn't come with a Kinect in box. It's not like Microsoft can't put that think in there, it's needed for the console to operate.

I feel like Sony isn't going to win hard with early adopters (at this point in time), but we'll see what E3 brings. This is going to be a very interesting holiday season to watch, either way.

Does Sony get a tiny tiny amount of money for each Xbox sold since they are using Bluray?

Does the playercount on something like Battlefield match PC with the PS4, while staying low on One?

I dont think theres any reason to cripple player counts in games compared to the PC versions. I think when they show BF4 they'll really stress the huge player counts for the PC, PS4 and xbone.

In terms of RAM, the PS4 is actually probably more then 2x faster. It has RAM clocked at more then double the speed and interfaces directly between the GPU and GPU, whereas the XONE has much slower RAM that attempts to offset some of it's slowness by offloading some data to ESRAM.

@seppli: @ares42:

There is a difference between 'power' and lead console. Remember the Original Xbox was more powerful than the PS2 but it was slaughtered in sales and only got slightly higher quality textures or a few more tessellations on the PS2 ports in most cases. Games that were made for the PS3 first, such as Final Fantasy 13 (1 & 2) were better on the PS3 than 360, and games that were single console such as your Uncharted and God of War games were no slouch for lack of 'power'.

For multi platform games it's going to come down to simple number of consoles sold to determine lead platform and we'll either see a crummy up res or janky down scale.

@salarn: But that's sorta the core of the argument this time around, there isn't really a lead console. Everything will be made to run on a PC, because everything uses PC tech. And then it's just minor differences in optimization for each console. Every generation before this the consoles have used special customized tech which makes power relative based on how well the developers understand the systems, but that's just not the case this time around.

@ares42: There is always a lead platform when developing a game. Not every studio can afford to give every developer/tester every dev kit. Not every developer can spend the time to test their work on every platform. Not every studio can ignore the cash being thrown around for exclusivity (even timed) for a platform.

You pick one and you port to the others, and that choice is not based purely on 'power' never has and never will.

The least powerful console will set the standard as to what developers have to work with, pretty sure economics will determine that.