It?s the battle royale of gaming consoles, and it is coming right into your living room ? very, very soon.
Estimates suggest that video gaming is a $70 billion-a-year industry, and Microsoft and Sony are suitably fighting it out for supremacy in the consoles market ? devices that allow or reject particular games to be played.
It?s just been a couple of months and but a few days in 2013, and console competition is already heating up. Rumours suggest that PlayStation 4, the latest Sony console unveiled on February 20, 2013, and Xbox 720, Microsoft?s upcoming console, will get to head-to-head within this quarter.
Within a few days of the potential leak concerning the newest Xbox?s CPU, rumours suggest that Microsoft is gearing up to secretly showcase its Xbox 720 to a select group of gamers and geeks.
While Sony launch the first salvo in the battle to win the hearts and minds of gamers willing to ride the next-generation console, the specs of the soon-to-surface Xbox 720 will eventually decide which way the pendulum swings.
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If rumours are to be believed, Microsoft will be unleashing a power-packed tiger in the box that will be Xbox 720. But those are rumours and should be treated as such.
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On the other hand, the PS4 has some awesome specs ? and they aren?t just rumours either.
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Now we know we shouldn?t be comparing the real deal with rumours, but that?s just what we have right now. Sony?s announced specs for the PS4 vs. the rumoured specs for the Xbox 720. So why not?
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Processor Power
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Not much to choose between the two as far as the engines that powers the two consoles are concerned.
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The Sony PS4 has an 8-core x86-64 AMD Jaguar processor and 8GB of GDDR5 RAM. Its GPU is of the Radeon family and contains a unified array of 18 compute units, collectively generating 1.84 teraflops of processing power. With an added feature that will allow developers be toggle power between processors as and when they see fit, the new console mimics more of a PC?s performance than any of its predecessors.
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As far as rumours for the Microsoft Xbox 720 are concerned, it too will have an 8-core AMD processor and 8GB of RAM. Graphics will be run on an 800MHz D3D11.x GPU ? more or less similar in power to the PS4.
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Where Microsoft could ? should ? still surprise us is in the graphics department. Let?s wait for that, though.
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Control Cruise
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Sony has taken a leap of faith by literally reinventing its popular DualShock controllers, mixing and matching components with the PS Vita?s controls. We like it ? yes we do. But let?s be honest ?Microsoft is the big daddy in controls, and we believe it will stay that way with the upcoming Xbox 720. Sensor, player tracking, resolution? we have high hope of the Xbox 720 and believe Microsoft won?t disappoint us there. Will it?
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Older-Model Compatibility
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The all-new PS4 will sever any and all ties with older model games ? so we?ll see a lot of PS3 games being put up on Dubizzle by Sony aficionados. It will, however, allow gamers to live stream older games to their machines. I.e., play remotely hosted older games on your new device ? for a fees. Your older discs will remain as useful as a raincoat is in Dubai.
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This is where Microsoft, if it has the?umm?courage, can really trump its arch-rival by offering what is known as backward compatibility with the Xbox 360 games. It didn?t exactly do that when it expected users to graduate from the Xbox to the Xbox 360, but it has a real chance to steal a march over
Sony with this trick.
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Eventually, however, we suspect that monetary constraints will triumph. Consoles are a small ? but vital ? part of the industry, and firms tend to subsidise consoles as they know they will be making their cream from the game discs. It might be counter-intuitive to allow the new consoles to play old games, in effect choking your own profit-lines. Still, one doesn?t stop hoping.
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Social Sharing?
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This is where Sony has the best bragging rights. We believe shared gaming is the future, and Sony has snatched a bold advantage in this domain. The ?share? button on its revamped DualShock 4 controller offers a gamer the choice to share some of her recorded gameplay (it gets constantly recorded into a finite buffer) on social and video sites. Plus, one can invite an online friend to ?watch? or even ?play? your game in real time. Cool, eh?
Microsoft obviously knows that Sony has taken the lead here and the Xbox team must have spent a fair bit of time and though on countering Sony?s social sharing advantage. The big question is whether or not they have managed to find something that will get them at a par or even ahead of their rival in the social sharing domain.
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Storage/Download
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The Sony PlayStation 4, once again, has the edge over its rivals ? it allows a gamer to get on with a game even before it has completely downloaded. In a nutshell, it downloads games in segments, and you can start playing the first segment soon after it downloads even as the rest of the segments continue to be downloaded in the background. Will the Xbox 720 ape this feature? It?ll be foolish to not do so. Additionally, the Sony PS4 offers a ?built-in? hard disc drive although Sony hasn?t specified its size yet. Microsoft could steal the march by offering a reasonably bigger built-in HDD with the Xbox 720.
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Pricing and?Availability
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Don?t expect a massive difference here. The PS4 and Xbox 720 are both expected to be priced between Dh1,300 and Dh1,500 ($350 and $400). And while Sony has announced that the PS4 is ?Coming Holiday 2013?season, i.e., in store for Christmas shopping, expect the Microsoft aisle to be stocked with the Xbox 720 simultaneously if not earlier.
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So Which One?
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That?s not easy to say right now, considering that neither Sony nor Microsoft has actually shown the real thing yet. Sony has at least announced the specs while Microsoft?s remain rumours. Let?s keep it open for now ? at least until Microsoft comes out and tells us what the Xbox 720 will spot under the bonnet. And we might not have to wait too long for that ? market insiders claim that Microsoft could reveal the Xbox 720 either at the Game Developers Conference later in this month, or at the annual games expo E3 in June. Watch this space.
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