The week of E3 is always one of rampant speculation, but when two console makers out their latest consoles and reports start floating around about their specifications, it is difficult to not compare them.
When Phil Spencer announced Project Scorpio on the Xbox stage at E3, the console was revealed to have a huge specification bump from the Xbox One. Project Scorpio is said to produce six teraflops of graphics compute power, have an astounding 320 GB per second memory bandwidth, and be able to output games in 4K resolution.
With the promised 4K resolution aside, that is greater than a 4.5x increase in performance over the current Xbox One (which produces about 1.31 teraflops), which is already quite powerful, though not as beefy as the current PlayStation 4 which produces about 1.84 teraflops of graphics computer power. The PlayStation 4’s current memory bandwidth is roughly 176 GB per second.
A few reports say that the PlayStation 4 Neo (or PlayStation 4K, Playstation 4.5, etc.) is going to be launching with specifications in the range of 3.3 – 4.2 teraflops, which puts the Xbox Project Scorpio roughly 1.5 to two times more powerful from a graphics processing standpoint.
On the memory front, the purported bump to 218 GB per second memory bandwidth for the PlayStation 4 Neo also lets Project Scorpio jump ahead with a near 50% faster memory bandwidth increase over Sony’s as yet unreleased console.
With actual specifications up in the air, it is nearly impossible to suggest that we could compare the actual performance of one console to the next. As it goes, there are other factors that influence the performance of a particular console, including the operating system, background processes, and efficiencies in the engine of each individual game.
It does stand to reason, however, that at this point, the Xbox team’s Project Scorpio is going to be a fair bit more powerful than the PlayStation 4 Neo, which would be quite a shift in the story between Sony and Microsoft at this stage in the console life cycle.
What do you think about which console is going to be more powerful? Will Microsoft’s announcement of Project Scorpio influence Sony to rethink development of PlayStation 4 Neo in favour of something with even more power?
Let us know what you think in the comments below, and on Facebook and Twitter!