The PlayStation 4′s memory reading and ALU is noticeably faster than Xbox One, developer sources have claimed.The claims come from this Edge article. The site claims that developers have painted the difference between both consoles as “significant” and “obvious.”
Edge’s sources are reported to have said that the PS4 memory reads between 40-50% faster than Xbox One, and Sony’s Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) is around 50% faster than Microsoft’s. The example given by the site stated that a “platform-agnostic development build can run at around 30FPS in 1920×1080 on PS4, but it’ll run at “20-something” FPS in 1600×900 on Xbox One”.
One source also said that, “Xbox One is weaker and it’s a pain to use its ESRAM.” Microsoft recently said that it had upped the console’s clock speed, but another developer told the site, “the clock speed update is not significant, it does not change things that much. Of course, something is better than nothing.”
Apparently, both Sony and Microsoft have not finalised each console’s form, and that both companies are working on new graphics drivers for each respective system. Microsoft is being slow in the matter, one source suggested and added, “that has been hurting them.” Another source called the Xbox One graphic drivers, “horrible.” Drivers are said to improve right up to launch however.
One source did say that the Xbox One does have a leg up on the PS4 however, “Let’s say you are using procedural generation or raytracing via parametric surfaces – that is, using a lot of memory writes and not much texturing or ALU – Xbox One will be likely be faster.”
