Gadgetory

comparing cpus and gpus of utterly different architecture can be a daunting task now this was the case for the last generation luckily this is not the case for the new generation of consoles in this episode we'll be taking an in-depth look at the CPUs GPUs and RAM of the ps4 and Xbox one its LP from TechnoBuffalo welcoming you back to the next installment of the console wars if I were to have made this comparison back in the good old days the round would have lasted probably two minutes now 25 years later things have gotten a bit more complex so I'm just going to cut to the chase both Sony and Microsoft have opted for AMD's custom APU solution that combines a CPU and GPU onto a single chip now this has its advantages an APU makes more efficient for the two chips to work in unison this consumes less power and the physical benefits are of course that the surface area of the single chip is much more manageable in terms of cooling both a fuse holds the custom low-power AMD Jaguar CPU it has two quad core modules that are designed around the x86 architecture coming from PCs dating back over 30 years the ps4 hosts a 1.6 gigahertz processor and the Xbox one hosts a 1.75 gigahertz Jaguar CPU and in case you're wondering what x86 really means well the x86 instruction set is basically the main interface between the programming language and the hardware x86 has been the most common instruction set used by both Intel and AMD since the very beginning of modern pcs so it should be very familiar to pretty much everyone in the business of programming games now this was not the case for the ps3 cell processor which was more than just a simple pain-in-the-ass to develop for the PowerPC solution on the Xbox 360 was better in this regard but it was also not the most ideal solution in terms of development across multiple platforms and thank goodness both companies have now realized the importance of making game development as convenient and is affordable as possible I think it's very unlikely that Sony and Microsoft made a deal behind closed doors to unify the key architecture so I'd actually give credit here to AMD who is most likely presented both companies with an offer they could not refuse and this is to the benefit of the entire industry so much obliged AMD and good thing that Nvidia wasn't a sore loser in any case the Xbox one's more robust cooling solution enables a slightly higher clock speed so the green teams has a 10% advantage here there's still debate on how many CPU cores are actually devoted to gaming performance on both systems but most likely these differences aren't substantial enough to give significant advantages to either console as modern games are less CPU bound and more GPU intensive and this is exactly why the majority of the chip real estate is devoted to the graphics processing unit on bold ap use the GPUs in bold consoles are based on AMD's GCN a graphics core next architecture this is essentially the same architecture as in AMD's HT 7000 and its new r9 series of graphics cards and it's actually the same architecture as used in my own 7970 gigahertz edition graphics card at its prime so about two weeks ago this was a 400 bucks graphics card so in addition to the semi high end GPU my gaming rig features about a grand and a half of other components so ps4 can be a rocket scientist or the murmurs off the Xbox these will always be a step ahead georgians disk drive because you can't afford less amount of money into it but don't get me wrong the formants optimization is where the consoles can really stand out against PC where the potential of even high-end graphics cards go often under used coding directly the specific set of hardware enables developers to crunch out every little bit of juice and this is why console games can look at gorgeous and in many cases even get close to the visual fidelity of high-end graphics cards beautiful graphics are just so much more than high resolution graphics and textures multisample anti-aliasing and above 60 framerate I'd actually go out to say that design and art makes up for about half of the visual experience and in some cases even more that being said I do expect a significant leap in graphical prowess with every generation of hardware so I'm a bit surprised at how many yresolution doesn't matter articles there are out there because in an age where 40 inch televisions are considered as small resolution simply matters 720p on a 65 inch screen at an average viewing distance things start to get fugly pretty fast at these TV sizes there's a significant difference between 720p and 1080p and this is true whether or not you believe in it I got a bit sidetracked there but in any case both GPUs embedded on the dies of the consoles are of the same AMD architecture but there are some significant differences Microsoft elected to implement 12 GCN cores resulting in a total of 768 stream processors while Sony went with a total of 8 team GC and cores and that adds up to 11 hundred and 52 stream processors and this equals to 50% more stream processors on the ps4 and what our stream processes you ask well stream processors in the GPU handled most of the traditional graphics rendering tasks but they can also be harnessed for more general-purpose number crunching and one good example of this are particle effects which seem to be making a comeback this generation the GC and cores are capable of doing a lot of the tasks that were traditionally assigned to the central processing unit and they can actually do a lot better job at it we've already seen games like resogun and infamous second son use very elaborate particle systems and metal gear ground zeroes has a spectacular simulated weather system this is actually done mostly by the GPU as the architecture allows for general-purpose computing which modern GPUs can actually do better than traditional CPUs with the GPU and eight core CPU working together we can expect some spectacular stuff to come we'll see much more advantage taken of these features as we progress in the consul's life cycles in addition to 64 stream processors each GC and core host for texture mapping units as the PlayStation 4 has 50% more GC and cores it also has the same advantage in texture mapping units which are responsible for addressing and filtering the textures that you see on the screen the more texture mapping units you have the faster the GPU will be at processing texture info while the Xbox one may have the better clock rate on the GPU the ps4 has 50% more GCN cores which may result in a lot more leeway when it comes to graphics rendering and even some more general-purpose computing tasks but where does all this power come from let's take a closer look at what powers these consoles zoom in please a little bit more yes it's had and what about the Xbox one right in any case ROPS or raster operations pipelines are also key to visuals Rob's help with implementing anti-aliasing that smooths out the jaggies and Astro filtering that enhances the textures and z-buffer that calculates depth effects etc this is essentially the part of the GPU that makes the finishing touches to the graphics so having half the amount of roughs isn't doing the Xbox one any favors the PlayStation 4 has eight ace units or asynchronous compute engines while the Xbox one only has two asynchronous compute engine service command processors for compute operations on the GC and cores in essence they manage the workflow and resource allocation of the various tasks making it more efficient for the gcn cores to do several tasks at the same time as time goes by developers may learn new techniques to capitalize on these ace units subsequently reducing the GPUs workload on a sidenote the ps4 actually shares the same amount of ACE units as the super high-end r9 290x AMD graphics card but the power the CPU and GPU are nothing without the memory interface and one of the biggest complaints from developers about last gen Hardware was the memory or simply the lack thereof high definition graphics require a crapload of textures and all kinds of content simultaneously on the screen for each individual frame so you can imagine how tricky it has been to fit even 720p worth of textures for every frame of content with less than 512 megabytes of RAM for this generation the message is clear from both Sony and Microsoft you asked for it so here it is developers no longer need to waste time in conceiving clever ways of streaming textures from virtual memory they can just throw an enormous amount of textures and other attributes in huge pools of memory so when it comes to graphics I'm pretty sure that the amount of memory will not be the bottleneck of this generation 8 gigabytes is more than enough both systems have a unified memory architecture with the same memory being allocated for graphics and various other tasks Microsoft went with a more conservative and affordable alternative of ddr3 and Sony splurged on some more expensive but faster gddr5 the differences between the two are that ddr3 is considered as more general-purpose memory and gddr5 is mainly designed for graphics use both types of memory have their benefits gddr5 is significantly faster allowing for whopping memory bandwidth but ddr3 has a lower latency which allows a bit faster access to compensate for the lower bandwidth of ddr3 the Xbox one uses 32 megabytes of a super-fast es RAM which is embedded on the same die with a CPU and GPU for almost immediate access the es Ram is specifically reserved for tasks that require a very high bandwidth developers are also able to access both memory pool simultaneously which can make it possible for more overlapping graphical effects while the 32 megabytes may seem a bit small for this day and age developers can map an unmapped content on the superfast virtual memory with amazing speed and super low latency which can enable all kinds of graphical eye candy like z-buffer and shadow maps effects for example project cars will use the es RAM for deferred rendering so we can expect to see developers better taking advantage of the esram going forward despite the undoubtedly interesting potential of esram many developers have stated to prefer the sustain speed of GTA 5 over esram simply for the fact that gddr5 is almost as fast and there is essentially no limit to how much you can use and it's just that much more straightforward to code for there's a misconception however going about that es Ram is bottlenecking the Xbox one from outputting 1080p it simply is the case because 32 megabytes of high bandwidth es Ram is more than sufficient for 1080p frame buffer it's more likely that the es Ram is indirectly limiting the performance by taking up space on the APU die from elements that actually crunch out the numbers to push out the pixels I think many would agree that this real estate could have been better served with poor GCN chorus for example clockspeed teraflop accounts Rob's Asus memory bandwidth is all this textbook jargon translate into practice quite consistently throughout every multi-platform game released a date there seems to be a slight pattern emerging Xbox one iterations of games are running at lower resolutions Metal Gear Solid Ground zeroes Call of Duty ghosts Final Fantasy 14 tomb raider trials fusion and list goes on all run at 1080p on the ps4 and not so much on the Xbox one the tech spec advantage is on paper and the math is adding up to sum things up both systems have done a good job in making things as accessible as possible for developers eight gigs of RAM is more than enough to enable developers to slap all the textures and all the content that is needed 1080p renderings of graphics the Xbox one has the GPU and CPU running at a higher clock rate but no matter how you look at the amounts of stream processors ultimately determine how many pixels the chips are crunching out and a ps4 has a significant advantage in this respect the advantage in stream processors is also consistent with the power consumption tests we've made in episode 2 ps4 is more power hungry and this is very much thanks to the gcn cores eating up those watts and the math is consistently adding up as well Sonne gamble been implementing the more expensive gdr 5 which Microsoft stated to be not great for developers but looking at how games perform and how much textures developers have already managed to slap into games like infamous second son and even launch game Killzone Shadowfall not to mention the praise that the ps4 has been getting from devs it's safe to say that Sony's gamble has already paid off I am actually a bit surprised at how technically accomplished the games were even at the earlier stages of this product cycle this is something that I definitely could not say during the last generation while the Xbox one is by no means a slouch the ps4 has a 50% advantage in stream processors double the amount or ops four times the ACE units faster unified memory and added bandwidth paths from CPU direct to the GPU and memory at this particular time in space it's hard to argue to the hardware and it's impossible to argue with a map these reasons playstation 4 takes round three with a clear market in the next round will be answering the question with the is Mario and we'll be taking a look at Nintendo State in the console stay tuned for the next installment of the console games by the way I believe in the winners and losers and especially the freedom to fail him who can him boo me thank you guys for watching please subscribe right here be the first ones to know whenever new videos get uploaded we got a ton of stuff we do phones tablets cars anything has to do with consumer electronics that's be plugged in or uses batteries we review