The Xbox One - Mini Review & Comparison to Xbox 360/PS4
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 20, 2013 8:00 AM ESTImage Quality - Xbox 360 vs. Xbox One
Before I get to the PS4 comparison, I wanted to start with some videos showcasing the improvement you can expect from launch day titles that are available on both the Xbox 360 and Xbox One. I turned to Call of Duty: Ghosts for this comparison as it’s broadly available on all platforms I’m comparing today.
Note that cross platform launch titles, particularly those available on previous generation consoles, end up being the worst examples of what’s possible on a next-generation platform. For the most part they’re optimized for the platform with the larger installed base (i.e. prior-gen hardware), and the visual uplift on new hardware isn’t as much as it could be. I’d say my subjective experience in playing a lot of the launch titles on Xbox One and PS4 mirrors this sentiment. Basic things like not having accurate/realistic cloth physics in games like CoD: Ghosts just screams port and not something that was designed specifically for these next gen systems. Just as we’ve seen in prior generations, it’s likely going to be a good 12 - 24 months before we see great examples of games on this new generation of hardware.
Now that I’ve adequately explained why this is a bad comparison, let’s get to the comparison. I’ve captured HDMI output on both consoles. They were both set to full range (0-255), however I had issues with the Xbox One respecting this setting for some reason. That combined with differences across Ghosts on both platforms left me with black levels that don’t seem equalized between the platforms. If you can ignore that, we can get to the comparison at hand.
All of these videos are encoded at 4K, with two 1080p captures placed side by side. Be sure to select the highest quality playback option YouTube offers.
The first scene is the intro to Ghosts. Here you can see clear differences in lighting, details in the characters, as well as some basic resolution/AA differences as well (Xbox 360 image sample, Xbox One image sample).
The second scene is best described as Call of Duty meets Gravity. Here the scene is going by pretty quickly so you’re going to have to pause the video to get a good feel for any differences in the platforms. What’s most apparent here though is the fact that many present day users can likely get by sticking with older hardware due to the lack of titles that are truly optimized for the Xbox One/PS4.
Now getting to scenes more representative of actual gameplay, we have Riley riding around wanting badly to drive the military vehicle. Here the differences are huge. The Xbox One features more realistic lighting, you can see texture in Riley’s fur, shadows are more detailed and there seems to be a resolution/AA advantage as well. What’s funny is that although the Xbox One appears to have a resolution advantage, the 360 appears to have less aliasing as everything is just so blurry.
Speaking of aliasing, we have our final IQ test which is really the perfect test case for high resolution/AA. Once again we see a completely different scene comparing the Xbox One to Xbox 360. Completely different lighting, much more detail in the environments as well as objects on the ground. The 360 version of Ghosts is just significantly more blurry than what you get on the One, which unfortunately makes aliasing stand out even more on the One.
Even though it’ll be a little while before we get truly optimzed next-gen titles, there’s an appreciable improvement on those games we have today for anyone upgrading from an older console. The difference may be more subtle than in previous generations, but it’s there.
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airmantharp - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link
Having actual CPU resources, a unified GPU architecture with desktops (and many mobile SoCs), and tons of RAM are all big differences over the last generation's introduction.The Xbox expounds on that by adding in co-processors that allow for lots of difficult stuff to happen in real-time without affecting overall performance.
mikeisfly - Thursday, November 21, 2013 - link
Thank god people didn't think like this when computers first started with switches and paper tape. Remember we have to start some where to move the technology forward. I want the Jarvis computer in Iron Man! You don't get there by making a console that can play games. You get there by making a console that can play games and has voice recognition and gestures and ......People get use to interacting with new input sources and then you find your self in a situation when you say how did I ever live without this. You guys sound like I did in the 80s when Microsoft was coming out with this stupid gui crap. "You will have to rip the command line from my cold dead fingers!" Where would we be today if everyone thought like me. Where would the Internet be if it was just command line. I for one applaud Microsoft for trying to expand the gaming market not just for hard core gamers but people like my girl too. I know the PS4 might have more power in terms of compute performance but that is not what games are about, it's about story line, immersiveness (made-up word), and to some extent graphics. Truth is there is really no difference between 1080 and 720 on a Big Screen, remember people this is not a PC monitor. And the X1 can do 1080p. I'm looking forward to what both systems can offer in this next generation but I'm more interested in the X1 due to it's forward thinking aspects. Only time will tell though.
douglord - Thursday, November 21, 2013 - link
Rule of thumb is you need a 10x increase in power to get a 100% increase in visual fidelity. Look at 360 vs One. 6x the power and maybe games look 50% better. So we are talking about the PS4 looking 5% better than Xbox One. In this gen, it really is about who has the exclusives you want.And if you are looking out 5+ years you have to take into account Xbox's cloud initiative. Have you used OnLive? II can play Borderlands 2 on an Intel Atom. If MS puts the $ behind it, those 8 cores and pitiful CPU could be used just to power the OS and cloud terminal. Only way these consoles can keep up with midrange PCs.
Revdarian - Sunday, November 24, 2013 - link
Interesting that you use numbers referring to visual fidelity, when it is a non quantifiable, perceptual, quality.Also there is no such Rule of Thumb regarding it, but what is known is that in certain games like CoD:Ghosts due to certain choices the xb1 is able to pump less than half the pixels that the ps4 can.
If you believe in the Cloud for that kind of gaming, Sony has bought Gaikai and it is a project that started sooner than the MS counterpart, heck the MS counterpart hasn't been named.
RubyX - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link
How do the noise levels of the consoles compare?According to other reviews they both seem to be fairly quiet, which is great, but is there a noticable difference between them?
szimm - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link
I'm wondering the same - I've seen lots of people point out the fact that the Xbox One is designed to be bigger, but more cool and quiet. However, I haven't seen any confirmation that it is in fact more quiet than the PS4.bill5 - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link
15w standby, seems a bit high.Lets say you leave it on standby 24/7, as you would, that's 360 watts a day, almost 11 KWh/s month. I pay ~10cent poer Kwh in general, so 1.10/month.
Could add up to $60+ over 5 years. More if the EPA enforces more regulations rising the cost of electricity as they typically are doing.
ydeer - Thursday, November 21, 2013 - link
Yes, the standby power of the XBone and PS4 bothers me too. I often leave my TV and Consoles untouched for weeks, so the only sensible thing is to put them on a Master/Slave powerstrip which cuts them off the grid when the TV isn’t on.Of course that defeats the entire standby background downloads, but in the case of Sony, I have to wonder why they put a whole proprietary ARM SoC* (with 2GB of DDR3 RAM) on the board for "low power standby and background downloads" and then end up with unbelievable 70W figures.
This is essentially a mobile phone without a display, I don’t think it should use more than 3 Watt idle with the HD spun down.
My only explanation is that they couldn’t get the ARM software/OS side if things wrapped up in time for the launch, so for now they use the x86 CPU for background downloads even though it was never intended to do that.
* http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/PlayStation+4+Teard...
ydeer - Thursday, November 21, 2013 - link
Correction, the SoC only has access to 2Gb (= 256 MB) of DDR3 RAM.However, I found a document that seems to confirm that the ARM Subsystem did not work as planned and Sony currently uses the APU for all standby/background tasks.
Maybe somebody who is fluent in Japanese could give us a short abstract of the part that talks about the subsystem.
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A//p...
tipoo - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link
Hey Anand, did you see the Wii U GPU die shots? How many shaders do you think are in there? I think it's almost certainly 160 at this point, but there are a few holdouts saying 320 which seems impossible with the shader config/size. They are basing that off the clusters being a bit bigger than normal shader cores, but that could be down to process optimization.