The subject of both the Playstation 4 and Xbox One’s CPU’s has taken a slight backseat compared to chatter regarding their GPU and memory performance. There are likely a few reasons for this, the first is the GPU and memory configurations between the two next generation consoles is a great deal different than their CPU’s. The second reason is in comparison to the performance of their graphics processors, data regarding the performance of their respective CPU’s has been a little thinner on the ground.
Allegorithmic released a benchmark late last year, showing off the texture performance of a CPU compared to a desktop’s I7, and Andy Tudor (a developer behind Project Cars) was also quoted in saying their CPU performance was “quite slow” when compared to that of a higher end desktop CPU.
Allegorithmic’s numbers were a little open to debate however, as to begin with it said “1 CPU” – which could have meant either 1 CPU (as in the entire processor), the a single CPU core, or the performance of an AMD Jaguar Module. Giles Fleury, the Technical Art Director over at Allegorithmic, has reached out to us at RedGamingTech and kindly provided a little clarification on how the results were reached, along how the tests were conducted.
“I know quite well this figure since I designed the algorithm used to get these numbers,” began Giles Fleury, “So maybe I can provide some information.”
“This algorithm is coming from one of our tool: Bitmap To material, it creates a full materiel from a color map (normal map, height map, ambient occlusion, specular, glossiness, height etc). And then compress the obtained image in a dds DXT format. The values you saw in the figure are about how many DXT compressed pixels we can generate per second on various hardware.”