Gaming: Xbox One vs. PlayStation 4

The “arms race” is on between Microsoft and Sony, said Taylor Hatmaker in ReadWrite.com. Their respective video game consoles, the new Xbox One and PlayStation 4, are gearing up to “lay siege to the living room,” and only one of them “will emerge victorious.” TV fans will be pleased with the Xbox’s “robust app lineup that includes ESPN, Fox Now, FX Now, HBO Go, and usual streaming-box suspects like Netflix and Hulu.” Purists might prefer the PS4, which offers “pretty skimpy” streaming, but—at a lower price than the Xbox One—“might prove to be the gamer’s console this round.”

For gamers, “the devil’s in the details,” said Andrew Cunningham in ArsTechnica.com. The PS4’s more powerful graphics processing unit and “more straightforward memory configuration” may edge out the Xbox One in terms of picture quality, but that could change as developers become more comfortable with the Xbox One. And the truth is that most players aren’t likely to notice. We’re no longer seeing the substantive differences anyone could spot between earlier generations of these two gaming consoles. The new PS4 and Xbox One “are very, very similar, even if they’re not identical.” And while the PS4’s stronger graphics might “give it the performance edge in the long term,” the war between these consoles “will be fought primarily with software and services, not with silicon.”

You could also shun both new consoles and put your PC “on par” with their performance, said Matt Smith in DigitalTrends.com. You may not be able to match the raw performance of the eight-core processors at the heart of these new products, but for most PC gamers, “even a desktop that’s a few years old should provide adequate grunt.” Still, PC users should at least ditch their dual-core processors for quad-cores, because “developers have more incentive than ever before to optimize for multi-core systems.” A good graphics card is still “a critical component for an optimal PC gaming experience,” but it’s not that hard to approximate the new consoles’ GPUs, which “aren’t exactly warhorses.” For a graphics card comparable to the PS4, a Radeon 7850 or GeForce GTX 650 Ti—both available for $140 or less—“will do nicely.” The consoles’ larger memory capability “is a detail most users need not worry about.” Both consoles “reserve a substantial amount of memory for their operating system,” so PC gamers who are running Windows should be able to emulate their performance with six gigabytes of RAM.

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