Great news for investors of Next Generation consoles – both Sony’s PS4 and Microsoft’s X1 are on track to beef up the performance of both machines, We’ve been hearing all sorts of rumors concerning this, but Thuway (or Ashan Rasheed if you prefer) has stated via Twitter both machines are looking good with their various performance improvements.
Let’s discuss the Playstation 4 side of things first. We’ve heard rumors from both Cort and Ashan there’ll be a hefty performance update coming – Cort Stratton mentioned Surface tiling and de-tiling would be vastly sped up, while Ashan had mentioned GPGPU. From what Thuway can tell, this is still the case – and it’s coming along very nicely.
Thuway said on Twitter “PS4 tools are getting better, efficiencies are being exploited, and redundandcies are being cleaned out, and GPGPU is a thing.”
So aside from the GPGPU stuff, which leverages the Playstation 4’s General Purpose Computing on the GPU advantage (compared to the Xbox One), Sony are in the process of clearly out their code structure. Without more information we can only speculate, but there’s a good chance this will come down to improvements in the PS4’s API and SDK’s and possibly even so low level OS changes too. All in all, great news for the PS4 – the compute potential of the console will turn into a crucial factor in the future of the system, particularly when developers have already commented the CPU is the low point of its specs.
Xbox One’s additional Bandwidth is up next, Thuway begins by saying “Oh and congratulations Xbox Community for the June 09th update. However, no this update is not going to make the gap close between PS4/X1.”He then says in a different Tweet “June update is great, and framerates and FX should improve across the board. Games for Gold will finally give XBL some much needed value.”
This is similar to what we’ve already discussed in other articles – the hardware disparity between the two consoles isn’t something that you can just optimize away. If Sony were to have an incredibly inefficient OS, API and awful SDK then sure, a very finely tuned Xbox One might stand a chance. But in reality, the Playstation 4 has low level optimization and just like Microsoft Sony are trying to squeeze everything out of the system to make it last as long as possible. As we’ve said yesterday, both systems are barely 6 months old, and considering they’ll likely last until at least 5 to 6 years, they’re just starting out.
