Just sharing what I come across from the development community, many pointed out that due to Microsoft choice of using the small eSRAM to output games in full 1080p, other mention on the combined system bandwidth controversy. It appears that PS4 have an upperhand on the hardware side, however just asking anyone have tried out xbox one latest sdk which was suppose to "resolve" this hardware limitation matter? http://www.developer-tech.com/news/2014/feb/17/xbox-one-1080p-comfortably-sdk-update-says-rebellion/ http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-the-xbox-one-architects http://www.giantbomb.com/xbox-one/3...-2-from-32mb-to-6gb-worth-of-texture-1448545/
PS4 is also struggling with this. This was one of the reasons i always pointed out that the PS3 and Xbox360 still had lots of potential. So far the "new generation" looks (graphically that is) like a small upgrade over the current one. Both were rushed to the market, both don't have games that make a new console purchase worth it,... This year's E3 is very important for both Sony and Microsoft, they really need to show some impressive stuff. Sony has the excuse of having lots of first party releases being done / completed for the PS3, but Microsoft ditched the Xbox360 in 2012.
Agreed, it took me a while to decide to upgrade to PS4. It's very nice but I'm expecting a lot more bang for the money. In MGS:GZ for instance, the sky is poorly done, looks like an image rolling over and over. Small thing but how hard is it to model some simple clouds these days?
The memory bandwidth is the worst problem on both machines, being a bit worse on XBOne, made even worse by the extremely poor implementation of DX11 and the mandatory use of WinRT bullsht :/
They should have allowed user expandable ram. This whole problem would be over if they let people chuck a 32GB ram stick in there. The follies of designing for cost vs futureproofing
^^ you point is clear, but if they allowed integral user part replacements/UPGRADE, they wouldn't be making their money on folks sending machine for repairs. futureproofing is NOT a valid concept in the COMMERCIAL world of consoles. (it was setup that way, what we perceive to be a folly, is certainly not to the corporations.) ... food for thought:
Nintendo did that with the N64, they released the 'Expansion pak", a 4MB add-on, that doubled the N64's RAM to 8MB. But not many people bought it, so only two games were made that needed it, Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, and Donkey Kong 64), and one of them (DK64) only needed it because when Rare reached the time when they had to release DK64, there was a serious bug that only occurred when there was no expansion pak present, so they altered DK64 to refuse to run if there was no expansion pack present, and told everyone that the game needed the expansion pack (source: three Rare workers, discussing Rare's games, at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFP9r6vJL2qCCERMBP_ZWUEV0vaSL4rHf ). Quite a few other games used the expansion pak if it was present, but mostly it was just an option to double the screen resolution, and in some games this lowered the frame-rate considerably (as Druid II says above, more memory doesn't necessarily result in any speed increase), so most people didn't bother with the hi-res option in those games. There were a few notable exceptions, such as Perfect Dark (which only gave you around 35% of the game if there was no expansion pak present (you could even play the single player campaign without an expansion pak), Rush 2049 (without the expansion pak you didn't get the sixth track), and Starcraft (if you had an expansion pak then some extra game levels were playable), but for most games you weren't losing out if you didn't have an expansion pak. And since so few games needed the expansion pak, or even really benefited from it, it didn't sell well. Which of course resulted in the catch 22 situation that few games were made to support it, so no one bought it, etc. Still, Perfect Dark and Majora's Mask are two of the best games on the system, so any real fan should have an expansion pak, but a used expansion pak tends to be more expensive than a used N64, since it's proportionally much rarer to find.
