Xbox One will let gamers use 50% more imagination

Developers say the PS4 is about 50% more powerful than the Xbox One. EDGE gathered the opinions of a multiple developer sources that said the gap between Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One could be wider than analysts initially thought. The sources told EDGE that the power difference is significant.

One basic example we were given suggested that without optimisation for either console, 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. “Xbox One is weaker and it’s a pain to use its ESRAM,” concluded one developer.

One source also claimed that cross-platform games could suffer due to political pressure from publishers or hardware manufacturers to keep parity between consoles. Games could be hobbled on the PS4 to not outperform the Xbox One version.

Earlier in the week, Ars Technica analyzed comments from Microsoft’s Albert Penello downplaying the power gap between consoles. Their conclusion was that much of Penello’s statements were meaningless or needed more explanation.

Update: Microsoft’s response follows:

“Ten years ago, you could argue that a console’s power was summed up in terms of a few of its specs, but Xbox One is designed as a powerful machine to deliver the best blockbuster games today and for the next decade.

Xbox One architecture is much more complex than what any single figure can convey. It was designed with balanced performance in mind, and we think the games we continue to show running on near-final hardware demonstrate that performance. In the end, we’ll let the consoles and their games speak for themselves.”