PS4 and Xbox One performance compared using AMD PC hardware

Both Microsoft and Sony have unveiled their respective next generation consoles and we’ve got a fairly good idea of what the hardware is capable of. There’s speculation that the PS4has a performance advantage due to its use of a more powerful GPU and faster GDDR5 RAM. But we won’t know if that turns out to be a real-world advantage until both machines are available to purchase.

Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry team has decided they can’t wait to find out, though, and have come up with a best guess test. What they did was to create two PCs using AMD components that best match the internals of the Xbox One and PS4 hardware in terms of the performance difference. Then they loaded up a number of games, but focused in particular on Crysis 3 on both machines to carry out some comparisons.

It’s important to note that Digital Foundry setup the hardware to focus on testing the graphics performance and didn’t want a CPU or memory bottleneck. So they opted to use a Core i7 3770K overclocked to 4.3GHz and 16GB DDR3 RAM running at 1375MHz. As for the GPU, the best equivalent to the Xbox One was found to be the Radeon HD 7850, for the PS4 it’s the Radeon HD 7870 XT, both with 2GB of dedicated RAM and running at 600MHz.

While the GPUs chosen may in fact be more powerful than those in the consoles, the important thing to get right was the difference between the two, which is 50 percent more raw performance in the PS4. Check out the videos above and below to see the difference that actually makes for gaming:

The performance advantage just on compute power from a better GPU isn’t as great as you’d expect. Comparing several games the performance gain varies between 17-22 percent in favor of the PS4. The PS4 does have another ace up its sleeve, though: memory bandwidth, which Digital Foundry admits could be a huge performance advantage. However, it’s hard to decide how big because we simply don’t know how fast the Xbox One’s SRAM is and how easy it will be for developers to take advantage of.

Ultimately, it seems that any games initially released as multiplatform titles will end up playing equally well on both next-gen consoles. It’s only when we get to 3rd and 4th generation game releases, when developers understand the hardware platforms much better, that we may see one console start to show a real advantage. On paper that looks likely to be the PS4.

Of course, Microsoft may have actually turned around Sony’s performance advantage before either console has launched if the rumors that the Xbox One GPU clock speed having been increased turns out to be true.