As discussed in a previous article, the gaming market is going through a period of significant change, which will open the doors to new and exciting options for players, such as cloud gaming, console being the pioneer G-Cluster in this new category, which will be followed by similar alternatives as SHIELD Nvidia console.
The ability to run games on the cloud is a new and controversial method, with many people marveling at such functionality and users against them for possible problems latencies and bandwidth. At the moment most users focus their attention on the computing power and graphics of the new generation of traditional consoles: Nintendo Wii U, Sony PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Xbox One
In this article we will compare the specs of these three new consoles, Android consoles with Nvidia as SHIELD, as well as to the re-edited XBox 360 Edition 2013. We begin with a brief description of the hardware of each:
Nintendo Wii U
Console launched late last year, based on a triple-core Power7 IBM microprocessor and includes a custom designed GPU by AMD and based on his popular and versatile graphics architecture VLIW5 in its sixth generation (design very similar to the Radeon HD 6000 GPUs Series “Northern Islands”).
NVIDIA SHIELD
Console to be released later this month, based on the Nvidia Tegra SoC 4 “Wayne”, SoC comprised 4 +1 core ARM Cortex-A15 and ULP GeForce GPU based on the old and versatile architecture Nvidia CineFX (released with the GeForce FX-5000 Series and GeForce GPUs evolved until 7000 and then form the basis graphical Tegra SoC).
Microsoft XBox 360 Edition 2013
XBox 360 is one of the most powerful console of the previous generation, so the first thing I would think, is that given the age of its architecture (2005), the new XBoX 360 Edition 2013 would be the weakest among which compare, for be measured against the latest in microprocessor architectures (CPUs) and graphics accelerators (GPUs) released between 2012 and 2013.
Microsoft XBox One
Arrive later this year and is based on AMD APU Krypto, as developed for Microsoft and consists of eight x86 cores based on micro-architecture and Jaguar AMD GPU architecture-based AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN probably 1.1 or 1.2).
Sony PlayStation 4
Also arrive later this year and is based on AMD APU Thebe, developed as Sony and consists of eight x86 cores based on
micro-architecture and Jaguar AMD GPU architecture-based AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN probably 1.1 or 1.2).
The Wii U hardware, SHIELD, XBox 360 2013, XBox and PlayStation 4 One
All consoles mentioned represent the new generation of game consoles except for XBox 360 Edition 2013, with no changes inwardly with respect to the original XBox 360 launched in 2005, but Microsoft has curiously decided to keep force parallel to its new XBox One
Compare the various consoles hardware is not a simple task because of different CPU and GPU architectures in which they are based, as well as the different approaches that possess various titles that run on them, among other factors that we will avoid to simplify comparison. We met their specifications in the following table:
As shown in the table, Sony PlayStation 4 console stands as the largest computing power (in GFlops), followed by XBox One, both grow apart for much of the other consoles, but we must mention that they are also more expensive, so we have developed a second table, analyzing their performance (GFlops) per U.S. dollar (USD $):
PlayStation 4 also stands with the highest performance per dollar (4.61GFlops x $), followed by XBox One (2.46GFlops x $), XBox 360 Edition 2013 (1.21GFlops x USD $) Wii U (1.18GFlops x USD $) and SHIELD (0.21GFlops x $), the latter has a very bad performance / USD $ compared to the other consoles exposed.
More consoles x86
While the moment PlayStation 4 (APU AMD Thebe) and XBox One (APU AMD Krypto) stand as the most powerful current consoles, maybe this post will not last long, because at the end of this year will also come powerful new consoles based x86, some of them running Linux based operating systems, and other traditional operating systems on PCs (Windows 8).
Among these new consoles Valve Steambox have the project (based on Linux), an initiative that has many designs and development projects, as PISTON (based on Trinity APU AMD together with a dedicated GPU). Also other consoles arrive shortly known as Glory Personal Gaming Console (based on EightCore VIA CPU + GPU Nvidia GK104 Kepler), and who knows what other surprises we have prepared other manufacturers.
Conclusions
You cannot judge a console based only on raw performance and price, because they have other characteristics that give them added value such as: ease of use, services, catalog of games and applications (and cost), exclusive titles , storage, optical drives, peripherals and a long list of additives that are beyond what we want to convey in this article.
Finally, although it is interesting that each console offers also worth mentioning that each of them points to users with different needs, so as healthy is to forget your specifications and think about the hours of fun that provide and how well running games designed for them.
