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Microsoft has criticised parts of the gaming community for spreading “misinformation” about the performance of Xbox One, and claimed that the alleged power difference between the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One has been “greatly overstated”.
In a post on NeoGAF, Xbox exec Albert Penello commented that, though he was “not disparaging Sony… the way people are calculating the differences between the two machines isn’t completely accurate. I think I’ve been upfront I have nothing but respect for those guys, but I’m not a fan of the mis-information about our performance.”
Penello then goes on to clarify key elements of the two consoles that he believes are often misunderstood, including beliefs that the lower amount of Compute Units available in the Xbox One lead to a 50 per cent power disadvantage, and that Xbox One’s memory is slower.
“So, here are couple of points about some of the individual parts for people to consider,” he said.
“• [PS4’s] 18 CU’s vs. [Xbox One’s] 12 CU’s =/= 50% more performance. Multi-core processors have inherent inefficiency with more CU’s, so it’s simply incorrect to say 50% more GPU.
• Adding to that, each of our CU’s is running 6% faster. It’s not simply a 6% clock speed increase overall.
• We have more memory bandwidth. 176gb/sec is peak on paper for GDDR5. Our peak on paper is 272gb/sec. (68gb/sec DDR3 + 204gb/sec on ESRAM). ESRAM can do read/write cycles simultaneously so I see this number mis-quoted.
• We have at least 10% more CPU. Not only a faster processor, but a better audio chip also offloading CPU cycles.
• We understand GPGPU and its importance very well. Microsoft invented Direct Compute, and have been using GPGPU in a shipping product since 2010 – it’s called Kinect.
• Speaking of GPGPU – we have 3X the coherent bandwidth for GPGPU at 30gb/sec which significantly improves our ability for the CPU to efficiently read data generated by the GPU.”
Penello also believes that his team often gets “little credit” for the progress it’s made on its software, and says that having “some of the smartest graphics engineers” on board for Xbox One is “overlooked when evaluating both boxes”.
He continued: “Given this continued belief of a significant gap, we’re working with our most senior graphics and silicon engineers to get into more depth on this topic. They will be more credible then I am, and can talk in detail about some of the benchmarking we’ve done and how we balanced our system.”
Xbox One and PlayStation 4 both launch this November.
Source: neogaf.com
