PlayStation 4 vs Xbox One Via Gaming PCs: Digital Foundry Pretend They Have a Clue

For some of us, ‘teraflop' is just a vaguely amusing word. Presumably to describe a fat guy's mishap on a diving board. When asked for our expertise on the graphical capacities of video games, we'll make illuminating remarks like, "See that tree in the background? I've never seen such a... tree-ish tree. They've captured its woody tree-ness 34.8% better than the last game in the series. Good stuff, and no mistake."

In short, a lot of us are lowly techno-heathens who drool on their shirts and enter rooms only to realize they can't remember what they wandered in there for. Apparently, what we need to do (need to do) is get our shit together and listen to the in-depth nerdly warblings of Digital Foundry. Their credibility on them thar interwebs may be questionable, but they've got jargon, videos and PlayStation 4 vs Xbox One performance-speculation for us, and they demand our attention. Woe betide he who disobeyeth the oracle!

To compare the duo of upcoming gaming wonder-boxes, they used PCs with the equivalent architecture, before taking a valiant stab at such questions as: to what extent will developers need to ‘water down' their PS4 games for the Xbox One? What does Sony's on-paper technical superiority mean for the games themselves? Crysis 3, Skyrim and Battlefield 3 are the guinea pigs in this interesting-if-you-can-make-out-what-in-holy-hell-is-going-on report.

The conclusion? "Transplanting those findings across to the next-gen consoles, developers for the Microsoft console have their work cut-out in utilising the DDR3 and ESRAM effectively in matching the sheer throughput of the PS4's memory bus. Getting good performance from the ESRAM is key in ensuring that Xbox One is competitive with the PS4."

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