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2013 is a very important year for all video game fans. After all, this year there will be a transition from the seventh generation of game consoles to the next - the eighth. Sony Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 will finally go to a well-deserved rest, and in November they will be replaced by the Playstation 4 and Xbox One. Let's take a closer look at each of these consoles separately, let's talk about their pros, cons, as well as the services they are able to offer to users.
How events developed
First, remember how it all began. In the previous generation, Microsoft made the knight's move and presented the Xbox 360 a year earlier with Sony with their Playstation 3. This gave the Redmond company a huge advantage and allowed to shake the position of a competitor who completely dominated the market with the Playstation 2. The output of the Playstation 3 was accompanied by numerous difficulties, including number and a rather high price of $ 599. As a result, Microsoft, which has a big head start, a lower price and a fairly strong gaming lineup, has taken a leading position in the United States. For Sony, however, there were European territories and Japan, where the American game console was not taken seriously in principle. This is the Japanese mentality - to reject all Western and support local producers.
This time it was a little different. Sony executive Kaz Hirai has publicly stated that they will not announce their new gaming console before Microsoft does. And just a month later, in February 2013, Sony organized a Playstation Meeting event, where they presented the Playstation 4 gaming platform and their vision for the future development of the gaming industry. Interestingly, PS4 games, Dualshock 4 game controller were demonstrated at the event, the technical characteristics of the new console were revealed, but the final design of the Playstation 4 was not shown to people, leaving a kind of intrigue. Microsoft did not expect such a move from the main competitor, because they promised not to hurry with the announcement of the next console. The Redmond company was simply not ready to show anything to the public, so frantically it began to prepare its own presentation.
In May 2013, Microsoft held their own event on the company's campus in Redmond, where the Xbox One was shown to the world for the first time, as well as several games for it. Here it should be noted that the event caused a wave of indignation among gamers around the world. Still, after all, Microsoft forbade sharing game discs with friends, reselling and buying them in specialized stores, and the worst thing was forcing users to constantly be connected to Xbox Live servers. In other words, if you don’t check in online at least once a day, then you simply won’t be able to play even single-player games. What to say about the fact that the new Kinect can not be disabled, even when the console is in sleep mode, because not everyone will like the constant surveillance of the "big brother." And the console itself made some strange impression on people. It seemed that Microsoft was promoting it as a cable television device, but not as a gaming device. At the presentation, the word “TV” sounded so many times that one can find funny music on the subject on the Internet. The name of the Xbox One console also confused people, because the first game console of the company, Xbox, which was released back in 2001, was colloquially the same.
The June E3 exhibition, where both Sony and Microsoft promised to reveal the remaining cards in relation to new game consoles, and finally name their prices, should dot the i. Sony, among other things, was the first to demonstrate the design of the Playstation 4 to the world.
Microsoft took into account all the negatives that hit them in May, and in the course of the demonstration they tried to give their best. Numerous video games from various publishers were shown, many exclusive projects that only Xbox One users can play, and the word “TV” has almost never been heard from the stage. The price tag on the Xbox One console was 499 US dollars.
Sony's presentation was more measured, calm, without much loud statements. It seemed that the Japanese, after the disastrous performance of Microsoft in May, were absolutely confident in their abilities. The design of the PS4 caused a storm of applause, as the console was about two times smaller than the Xbox One. Sony’s policy did not prohibit changing used-games, selling and buying them, and PS4 is not required to be connected to the Internet around the clock. And when the PS4 price was announced in the amount of $ 399 - the hall just burst into applause, many viewers and journalists rose from their seats. The hundred-dollar price difference and friendly politics certainly turned out to be the trump cards that instantly made Sony the leader of the entire E3 exhibition.
Some time after the end of E3, Microsoft issued a statement that they are canceling their “dictatorial policy”, which prohibits playing offline and changing games with each other. In addition, they will allow players to turn off Kinect at any time. Listening to criticism and giving in to popular opinion is a rather serious step on the part of such a large corporation. But it was too late. Consumer negative opinion about the Xbox One was formed by numerous publications in the media, videos on YouTube and popular blogs. In other words, Microsoft, without realizing it, gave a huge advantage to its competitors in the face of Sony, literally gathering all the criticism of the gaming community itself. What is curious, after this failure, the head of the Xbox division, Don Mattrick, who had worked for the company for more than 6 years and put on his feet the first two Xboxes, hastily left his post and headed the company Zynga.
So, we remembered how the events of the first half of this year had developed. It's time to examine in detail the features of the new game consoles and compare them with each other.
Technical specifications
Cases of consoles are currently available only in black color. Xbox One can only be used in a horizontal position. Microsoft officials have officially announced that if you put the console vertically, it can break it. Playstation 4 can be placed both vertically and horizontally, depending on how you like. The physical dimensions of the consoles immediately catch your eye: Xbox One is more than two times larger than the Playstation 4. From the pleasant design elements, you can highlight the fact that the front panel of the Xbox One has a glowing white logo on the console, which is also a touch on button and The side surface of the Playstation 4 is a blue LED line that looks very nice in the dark. But there is also a fly in the ointment for fans of Microsoft consoles: the power supply of the Xbox One is still external, and this “brick” is quite an impressive size. Japanese engineers at Sony once again performed a miracle by hiding the power supply inside the already tiny Playstation 4 case.
At the heart of both consoles is a 64-bit 8-core (two modules with four cores) AMD central processor manufactured on the basis of Jaguar x86 architecture. Despite the fact that Jaguar was originally designed for use in laptops and tablets, it should not be underestimated. The processor itself was individually redesigned by AMD to meet the requirements of Microsoft and Sony, so it would not be entirely correct to consider it to be equal in performance to processors that are installed in modern tablets. The processor has a very low power consumption, so it will not overheat even at peak loads. Each processor is equipped with a 4 MB L2 cache (2 × 2 MB). Initially, it was stated that the processor of both consoles will operate at 1.6 GHz, but Microsoft announced that they managed to overclock their processor at 150 MHz, and now Jaguar in the heart of Xbox One will work at a clock frequency of 1.75 GHz. Due to the fact that both console manufacturers have switched to x86 architecture, porting games from PC to consoles and back will now be much easier and faster, and the low cost of manufacturing such processors will ultimately have a positive impact on the final price of gaming consoles.
Both consoles use modified Radeon GPUs from the same AMD for processing and displaying graphics. The Playstation 4 GPU contains 18 computing units (1,152 graphics cores) with a theoretical peak performance of 1.84 TFLOPS. The Xbox One graphics system is based on 12 computing units (768 graphics cores) with a peak performance of 1.23 TFLOPS. The GPU frequency of both consoles was initially equal to 800 MHz, but Microsoft overclocked it to 53 MHz and now their GPU operates at a frequency of 853 MHz. In general, these minor “overclocking” of frequencies in the central processor and GPU by Microsoft look just like the desire to be “numerically” at least a little ahead of its main competitor, and are unlikely to mean a significant increase in performance.
Next-generation consoles use a 256-bit memory bus. The Xbox One has 8 GB of DDR3 memory with a bandwidth of 68.3 GB / s (2133 MHz). Playstation 4 in this regard significantly exceeds its competitor, since the Sony console uses 8 GB of GDDR5 memory with a capacity of 176 GB / s (5500 MHz). Just in case, it should be clarified that both consoles use a “unified memory pool”, i.e. The CPU and GPU will store data in one place, without the need to constantly drag and drop them from one memory to another.
Microsoft attempted to level the low bandwidth and frequency of DDR3 memory on its console, complementing it with a 32 MB special ESRAM module with a bandwidth of 102 GB / s. But many experts have already expressed skepticism about this unnecessary complication of the memory structure of the Xbox One.
Both consoles are used as a storage device HDD volume of 500 GB. Only in the Xbox One it is not removable, and if the place on it ends - you have to delete the old games. On the Playstation 4, a tradition that has its roots in the days of PS3, you can remove the complete hard drive and replace it with a more capacious one of your choice.
Both consoles use Blu-ray discs as optical media and have not lost their ability to play DVDs. Xbox One will require the full installation of the game on the hard disk, so the disk in the drive will be used only to identify the licensed copy of the game, but the game data will be read only from the HDD. The speed of reading from Blu-ray in PS4 has increased to 27 MB / s since the time of 9 MB / s in the Playstation 3.
The Playstation 4 is equipped with 802.11 b / g / n wireless communication modules, a gigabit Ethernet module, Bluetooth 2.1, as well as two USB 3.0 ports and a special port for connecting the PS4 Camera. The console will output the video signal via HDMI, and if you wish, you can connect the speaker system via the optical port S / PDIF. For the first time, Sony abandoned the availability of analog video and audio output in its console.
Xbox One differs only in that it has 3 USB ports, does not use the built-in Bluetooth module, and also has a special HDMI-in port for connecting cable and satellite receivers. Also, Xbox One uses a special format of wireless communication with game controllers, which is called WiFi Direct. It was introduced specifically to reduce the so-called input-lag during the game.
Game Controllers
According to Microsoft, the Xbox One controller contains 40 technical improvements as compared to the Xbox 360 controller. The most obvious differences are: a small redesign of the controller's case (it has become somewhat smaller), the presence of impulse knobs (special motors for kickback, hidden in the knobs), improved d-pad crosspiece, integrated battery compartment (now the battery compartment does not stick out from the back of the controller, as it did in the Xbox 360), as well as support for WiFi Direct (response speed increased by 15%). Despite these improvements, many eyewitnesses who have already managed to familiarize themselves with the new controller at various game shows, speak of it rather contradictory. Yes, the spider has become more comfortable, but the upper triggers have become so tight that not everyone can push them the first time. And the use of replaceable batteries in 2013 is a rather controversial decision on the part of Microsoft engineers. You can connect a headset to the controller to chat with friends while playing on the Web, and you can now use a micro USB cable as a wire to recharge the batteries (if you buy them instead of regular batteries). The Start and Back buttons have been replaced by Menu and View. The latter is likely to allow you to instantly switch between game mode and watching cable television.
The Playstation 4 controller, which was traditionally called the Dualshock 4, has also undergone a lot of functional changes. The most serious innovation was the touchpad at the top of the controller. This touchpad supports multiple simultaneous clicks, which will allow to apply it everywhere in numerous games, for example, to enlarge the world map, you can simply use the famous pinch gesture, like on smartphones. The touchpad, by the way, is pressed like a normal button. Something similar you could see on the Macbook Air, where the touchpad also plays the simultaneous role of buttons and touch panel. The analog handles of the Dualshock 4 have become concave so that your thumbs do not slide off them. The case is made of two types of high-quality plastic: the top of the controller is smooth, and its lower part is made of a special soft-touch material that will prevent the gamepad from even slipping out of sweaty hands. The controller has a built-in headset input, an additional port for future extensions and a monaural speaker that allows you to output some game sounds directly through the gamepad and thereby improve the feeling of feedback from the game (this approach has already been used in Nintendo Wii and Wii U). The feedback has also been improved: now 12 vibration motors are used in the Dualshock 4 (only 6 were used in the PS3). A gyro and accelerometer are built into the controller. A special light panel (light-bar) was added to the side surface of the Dualshock 4, capable of displaying almost any color. Using this panel, the console will be able to track the position of players relative to each other, and the color of the panel will be used by various games in order, for example, to signal a low level of remaining health (the green panel will turn red). Instead of the Start and Select buttons, the Options and Share buttons were added. With the help of the latter, you can quickly share screenshots or game videos with friends.
Motion sensors
Kinect camera has been significantly improved and is now able to see the world in 1080p resolution. She acquired wide-angle lenses, learned to see in the dark, recognize people's emotions and even, surprisingly, measure their heart rate. Recognition accuracy has greatly increased. Now Kinect is able to quite accurately determine each finger on your hands, the angles of rotation of each of your limbs, as well as the voltage of certain muscle groups in your body. The minimum distance to the sensor was halved from two meters to one. This will certainly please owners of cramped apartments, who previously had to move furniture in order to play Kinect games. The camera is able to simultaneously recognize up to 6 people in the room, it knows for sure which player has which controller and automatically loads its game profile, recognizing its face. As for voice commands, Kinect is able to simultaneously identify two familiar voices from the surrounding noise and identify their owners. The microphone will work continuously, even when the console is in sleep mode, so that the player can turn on Xbox One at any time with his voice. So, if you are paranoid - I advise you to delve into the settings and disable the permanent recording of what is happening in your apartment. Fortunately, Microsoft went to meet the users and allowed to disable Kinect, if desired. Let me remind you that the new Kinect will be included with every Xbox One.
Playstation 4 by default is not equipped with any cameras. This decision was made in order to reduce the cost of the console kit. Why should the user overpay for additional equipment, if he did not even plan to use it? Of course, if you really want to - you can buy the PS4 Camera, which goes on sale simultaneously with the new Sony console. Unlike the previous PS Eye camera, which was used in conjunction with the PS3, the camera for the Playstation 4 is now equipped with two lenses for accurate calculation of the distance to objects and sees the world at a resolution of 1280 x 800 and at 60 frames per second, has a viewing angle of 85 degrees, as well as a four-channel microphone set for screening out extraneous noise. The camera tracks the position of the Dualshock 4 game controllers in space thanks to the light panels embedded in them. Sony representatives said the camera will support voice control and gesture control. В комплекте с каждой консолью Playstation 4 будет поставляться бесплатная игра PlayRoom, которая позволит игрокам полностью прочувствовать обновлённый функционал PS4 Camera и познакомиться с новыми функциями во время увлекательных мини-игр. Никуда не делась поддержка контроллеров Move, так что, если вы являетесь их обладателем, не спешите их продавать. Глядишь, пригодятся в грядущем поколении.
В следующий раз мы поговорим про дополнительные развлекательные функции консолей следующего поколения, про эксклюзивные и мультиплатформенные игры, ценовую политику, облачные сервисы, а также о многом другом.
Продолжение следует…
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