Next Gen Graphics: How Good Are They? Part 1

Okay, so I got asked to do a comparison between the GPUs in the Xbox One and the PS4 compared to GPUs you can put into a computer. I'm not just going to look at raw power between the two. That's really not what we do here. I'm going to take the PC equivalent of console and compare it at a price-performance against other PC GPUs. This should give you a bit more perspective.

Now, let's quickly talk about the Next Gen GPUs. They're not dedicated graphics cards. They're APUs made by AMD. That means the memory is shared between the CPU and the GPU on the processor chip. Let's quickly look at the consoles.

PS4: AMD x86 8 core APU - CPU clock @1.6GHz, GPU core clock @800MHz, 8GB of GDDR5 RAM for whole system.

The PS4 has GDDR5 running the entire system. Personally, I don't think this was a brilliant idea, but it wasn't too dumb, either. Since the CPU and GPU share that memory, it's kind of smart. But GDDR5 is Graphics memory; that's what the G stands for. Graphics memory isn't as fast at processing data such as variables and such, so the CPU will suffer from the lack of low latency memory. It'll make your game look pretty, but expect some long load times and a few frame drops on non-scripted events such as random explosions.

Xbox One: AMD x86 8 core APU - CPU clock @ 1.75GHz, GPU core clock @853MHz, 8GB of DDR3 RAM for whole system.

The Xbox One also has fairly similar specs on the APU, except for they use two slightly different GCN devices with a different number of compute units. I'll explain after. The Xbox One uses DDR3 RAM. Personally, I think this may have been a good idea with an APU. Reason? The same reason GDDR5 RAM isn't a brilliant idea, but switched. The GPU loses a little bit of power from the memory clock (DDR3 RAM is slower than GDDR5 RAM on dedicated graphics, but evened out on APUs), but the CPU gains from having low latency RAM. Also, the CPU and GPU clock speeds are higher by a bit, but that may or may not make a huge difference.

Now, here's where the two consoles differ, other than clock speeds and memory. The PS4 uses a GCN device with 18 compute units, where the Xbox One uses one with 12 compute units. Each compute unit has 64 stream processors. So, basic math time: 18*64=1152. 12*64=768. The bad thing for both of these GCN devices is that they usually max out at 1GHz, but we already know the clock speeds for them.

Now, if we were to find equivalent GPUs on the PC by looking at all the data, we would get two different GPUs.

PS4 GPU = between 7850 and 7870.

Xbox One GPU = between 7770 and 7790.

Let's be fair and say that they use the latter of the cards. For our comparison, we will look at the price to performance and find a replacement or a better card and estimate a budget for an entire build.

Stay tuned for the comparisons (Part 2) tomorrow.

Happy Gaming.