Is Your Computer as Powerful as the Next Gen Consoles?
More and more we’re hearing that the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 4 are “more powerful” than the computers out there today. Most of this is coming from EA of course, but how truthful is it really? As a passionate PC gamer, I want to immediately call them out as complete idiots, but there are a few factors here that shine some light on the truth of it.
It’s All About Optimization
Let’s face it, it’s much easier for game developers to optimize a game for a specific set of hardware. If all of us bought the same model Alienware desktop we’d likely have games running at 300 frames a second on ultra high settings, and we’d probably be using hardware from 4 years ago. But the truth is, as PC gamers, we will never see such performance on a PC as gamers get on a console. It’s got nothing to do with a console being “better” than a PC, however it has everything to do with a game running more efficiently.
Now, there is some changes that can improve this for PC gamers. An article I read months back spoke of a developer who was working on a program that would allow other developers to write both sets of code used for hyper threading all at once. With today’s technology a developer has to write two separate lines of code for the same instruction in order write a program optimized for hyper threading. Now imagine the possibilities if that developer could do that with half the work… or perhaps write 4 or more lines of code for 8 core CPUs. Even a game that isn’t specifically optimized for your exact hardware would be able to utilize all cores available and perhaps push the envelope to”pass” consoles in efficiency. Now I’m no game developer, so what I’m talking about could be completely ignorant, but that’s just what I’ve read in other articlesand they sure made it sound promising.
Console Hardware
The playstation 4 will ship with a 8 core AMD Jaguar APU with a on-die GPU equivalent to a HD7870. The Xbox One will ship with a 8 core Jaguar APU as well, except it’s on-die GPU will be equivalent to a HD7790. The 8 core Jaguar APU is rumored to be have roughly half the computing power of a 4th generation I7 CPU. So unless your using 4 year old technology in your PC, it’s likely you’ve got more computational power than these consoles do. Either way, $399 for a PC with this kind of hardware is a rather good deal if you ask me.
Anyhow, it’s obviously that a lot of us here have systems that are way beyond the Xbox One, or the Playstation 4. However, after playing League of Legends I’ve really come to learn that people really are using ancient hardware still. Perhaps that’s what EA meant when they said current gen consoles will out power the PCs of today. I suppose what they should have said was current gen consoles out power the PCs of 900 yesterdays ago. How do you feel about it? I think EA is full of it by saying consoles are more powerful than current PCs, however they are better optimized, and that’s just how it’s going to be for now.
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