Saltyk said:
Now, it's my understanding that Microsoft has inferior architecture. That the Xbox One has one chip doing the same things that PS4 has divided among three chips. And that seems to be an issue that could cause a system failure in extended play. Not helped by the less than stellar reputation that the 360 had when it came to failing.
Of course, the reason it's so big is to help with the cooling process. Still not convinced it won't fail in time. Nor am I convinced that the system can handle the same processing as the PS4. The PS4 was designed to download games in the background while you play. It seems (according to a chart I saw) that Xbox One can, too. But I'm thinking they added that after they realized it was a good idea and I'm not certain it's something that the system will do well.
Honestly, it seems that Microsoft is playing catch up already. They pulled all those 180's on the DRM and such. They added the ability to record and upload video. I think they even stated that the system doesn't need the Kinect to work (though I think others have since said otherwise).
In comparison, PS4 has not made any changes.
And with all those recent changes, I'm not certain that the system should be coming out as soon as it is. Can you completely change a system six months before it launches and have it work?
And, of course, the final question. Which system will have better processing and framerate? I doubt graphics will vary much, especially in multiplatform titles, but which is better as the putting it all together?
I'd like to know what has influenced your opinion to give you the indication that they have inferior architecture? I may be misunderstanding what you mean by architecture, as I have no idea what you mean by the PS4 having three chips to the Xbox One's one. As far as I know (I am of course liable to be wrong, I haven't been exactly been following the news on it too closely), there's no real significant difference between the two. They're both running a custom AMD SoC with 8 cores, the main difference being the PS4 getting GDDR5 RAM, and 6 more Compute Units.
I'm pretty sure Microsoft is well aware of it's reputation with the 360 on hardware failures, they know they can't have two consoles in a row with the same sort of problems, it will be a far bigger PR problem than less powerful hardware.
Everything will fail in time, it's the nature of electronics. A bigger, cooler box merely reduces the chances of it happening. It can't handle the processing the PS4 can, they don't have the power; however downloading/storing/installing in the background is something that is not hard to do. (The network/hard-drive is far too slow to even begin to have an influence on performance).
Most of their 180's have been mostly PR moves, nothing that could really affect the console too much. The recording of video could actually be performance intensive if they were doing it in a silly way, if they simply stored the result of the draw calls into a circular buffer that's big enough to store the length of the video, then it would only be memory/hard-drive intensive, a single CPU core could handle that pretty easily. It doesn't need the Kinect, you can have it unplugged. It only ships with the Kinect, and that's because Microsoft realised that the kinect was a chicken-egg problem, people don't develop for it because not everyone has it; and people aren't picking it up because people aren't developing for it. They tried to use the new generation to change that.
Sony have played it pretty safe this generation, stronger hardware that's not radically different (i.e., not using the cell processor), no risky moves (such as DRM/Kinect), and their competitor has been making stumbles. They haven't need to make any changes, and any that they did make would make them look weaker.
As I mentioned earlier, most of their changes have been PR moves. It's mostly been minor OS edits and minor tech changes, a minor CPU clock upgrade and stripping the new DRM system out is going to mean next to nothing in terms of the bigger console picture.
The PS4 will, almost without a doubt, but it won't be by much. Developers will find a way to squeeze that extra power out, but it won't happen for a while. You won't notice it until a lot closer to the end of the consoles life-time, and the multi-platform titles will show it to an even lesser extent. Much like the current consoles the extra power will be used blindly at first while developers get used to it, then as the generation goes on they will settle in and find all the little tricks to stretching out the power (such as doing certain operations before others, building this shader operation this way because the GPU can do it .01% faster, etc, etc). It won't be as bad as this generation was because the consoles are pretty similar to PCs, unlike last time. The 360 introduced unified shaders (and a few other things) and the PS3 had the cell processor, which required a fair bit of work to get used to.
