Xbox One, PS4 A Generation Ahead Of Gaming PCs Says EA

Consoles sporting just over 1 teraflops are apparently more powerful than today's high-end gaming machines, according to Electronic Arts. Someone slap some sense into me or explain how a card like the 7990 “Malta” GPU with six times the raw processing power of either the Xbox One or PS4, all on its own, is somehow a generation behind? Someone...anyone?!

Well, GameIndustry.biz tries to explain some of the issues away, based on what Electronic Arts' chief technical officer, Rajat Teneja, said. He mentioned that...

"these architectures are a generation ahead of the highest end PC on the market."Our benchmarks on just the video and audio performance are 8-10 times superior to the current gen," ... "The compute capabilities of these platforms and the data transfer speeds we can now bank on, essentially removes any notion of rationing of systems resources for our game engines.""We'll really start to see more examples of true cross-device play,"... "Sony showed off the ability through their cloud gaming functionality to allow gamers to play high-end console titles on the handheld Vita product. The architecture of both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 present more opportunities to take your game from TV to smartphone to PC, with seamless ubiquity and experience gaming at any time, in any way on any device."

There's a PC Master Race member primed and ready with a response that reads “LOL @ comparing synthetic cloud computing data with real world high-end gaming PC capabilities”. I can't help but concur with that allegorical summation of the scenario.

I mean, are we really going to compare the potentiality of cloud computing on the Xbox One and PS4 with PCs? What's to stop that same comparison from carrying over into the PC market? Or is that the point...to compare that the next-gen consoles are future-proofed because they've been designed with cloud computing in mind to technologically compete with high-end PCs via streaming services?

Anyway, this is a bad way to get information out there comparing consoles to PCs. Let's not forget that cloud gaming isn't exclusive to any one system, as Onlive has been around for years.

Nevertheless, even with Gaikai and other streaming cloud services available for the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One, we should keep in mind that there are still a lot of barriers and roadblocks from keeping cloud gaming from being a true next generation source of interactive entertainment...barriers such as a data caps, ISP throttling and, of course, temporary hard disk space (that data has to be stored somewhere, right?)

I'm definitely excited to see what Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have to offer us this year in the video game industry space. However, let's not get ahead of ourselves with buying into marketing PR speak that vastly misrepresents the PS4 and Xbox One's technological capabilities. Also, Nvidia's Titan says “Hi” and AMD's Malta says “You only wish you could afford me.”

Oh yeah...almost forgot about this right here.

Will Usher

Staff Writer at CinemaBlend.