Xbox One Review 2013

Xbox One review

What is the Xbox One?

Eight years on from the launch of the Xbox 360 we finally have its successor; a powerful, multi-functioned super console designed not just to revolutionize gaming, but transform your living room. Curiously, this makes the fight between the Xbox One and Sony’s new PS4 the mirror image of the last console battle. Where last time Sony had the all-in, home entertainment powerhouse that ‘only does everything’, while Microsoft had the more streamlined, game-focused system, now it’s Microsoft pushing for the bigger vision and Sony running after the more hardcore gamers.

This makes reviewing the Xbox One tricky. It’s £80 more expensive than the PS4, and most of that £80 has gone on a Kinect sensor, a UI and a set of entertainment features that you might be ambivalent about. Much of your opinion will depend on how you want to use a console. Do you want it in the living room or in the bedroom, snug or study? Is your lounge already packed out with smart devices, or are you looking for something that brings you all your entertainment in one place?

It’s tempting to conclude that, with the Xbox One, Microsoft has put its long-term strategy for the living room ahead of the needs of its gaming audience. There’s some truth to that, and some of those who adopted the Xbox 360 might defect to the Sony side this time around. Yet there are some fine games in Microsoft’s launch line-up, and there’s plenty of potential in the console’s mix of hardware, Kinect, cloud-based services and exclusive IPs. 

Xbox One: Design and Spec

Your first impression of Xbox One will run along the lines of ‘Blimey, that’s a monster’. It’s a big, chunky console, reminiscent of the original Xbox – the one the Japanese legendarily nicknamed ‘the coffee table’. 

The Xbox One is a bit of a beast.

Once you get used to it, though, it’s not actually that big. It’s taller and fatter than a Blu-ray player or Sky box, but not dissimilar in size to the old Xbox 360 Elite. Once you have it sitting under the TV it’s surprisingly unobtrusive, and the new, squarer Kinect is more compact and more solid on the surface than the first-generation model. The console still needs a separate power brick, which is almost the same size as the one supplied with the Xbox Slim.

Connecting everything up isn’t a challenge. The Kinect plugs into its own dedicated socket, there’s an HDMI out to your TV and an HDMI in for your PVR or set-top-box, two USB ports, an Ethernet socket and an optical out for your soundbar or AV amplifier. The Xbox One doesn’t output much heat, even under load, and it’s very quiet in normal use, with only a small, high-pitched hum to alert you that it’s running. Start playing Ryse: Son of Rome or Forza 5 and the noise levels pick up, but this is Microsoft’s quietest Xbox yet.

The Xbox One is a bit of a beast
Internally, it’s based on an 8-core AMD Jaguar APU which is broadly similar – bar a few customisations – to the one found in the PS4. The big differences are clock speeds, with the Xbox One running at 1.75GHz to the Sony’s 1.6Ghz, and the number of cores in the built-in GPU. The Xbox One has 12 of AMD’s GCN compute units, with a total of 768 shaders. The PS4 has 18, which gives it a total of 1152 shaders. This gives the PS4 a considerable advantage on raw graphics horsepower, and one that the Xbox One’s higher GPU clock speed, at 854Mhz to 800Mhz, won’t compensate for.

To make things worse for Microsoft, while both consoles have 8GB of RAM, the PS4 comes packing 5500Mhz GDDR5 to the Xbox One’s 2133MHz DDR3. That gives the PS4 a lot more bandwidth between the CPU, GPU and system memory, and while the Xbox One has 32MB of faster embedded SRAM to cache data and reduce any bottlenecks, that still gives the PS4 a powerful theoretical advantage. Finally, while the PS4 can throw most of its resources at games, the Xbox One is holding a proportion back for the operating system and Kinect.

The first thing to say is that this doesn’t feel like a huge issue at the moment. Xbox One games like Forza 5 and Ryse look fantastic, run smoothly and have all the visual detail, overblown lighting and rich surfacing effects you might expect from a next-generation game. There is an issue with resolution, where key cross-platform titles like Call of Duty: Ghosts and Battlefield 4 are running at 720p on the Xbox One and at 1080p/900p on PS4, upscaled to 1080p for TV output. If this is the way things go it’s not necessarily a huge disaster, and at normal viewing distances on a below 46-inch TV you may struggle to see what all the fuss is about.

Yet this might matter in the future. We can’t see a situation happening where big franchises like Call of Duty, FIFA or Assassin’s Creed use noticeably different assets and effects on PS4 and Xbox One, but Sony may pull away when it comes to the exclusives, as it did with Uncharted 3, The Last of Us and Beyond: Two Souls on the last-generation systems. We can’t predict the future, of course, but unless you’re determined to pixel peep then both consoles deliver a sizeable and appreciable improvement on their predecessor.

Xbox One: Controller

With the best console controller ever made as a foundation, it was unlikely that the Xbox One would run amiss here, but the new Xbox One controller improves on the Xbox 360’s in a number of ways.

In the hand it’s lighter but still very familiar, with a similar layout of sticks and buttons. The thumbsticks have a textured ridge around the pad that adds a little extra grip, and the sticks themselves feel slightly tighter, more precise.

The new Xbox One controller

The triggers curve slightly outwards and the bumpers are larger, with all four fitting more naturally under the fingers. The D-Pad has a lighter, more defined feel, while the Start and Back buttons are now Menu and View, though in games they are still used in much the same way. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine how Microsoft could improve it.

The surprise hit feature, however, is the inclusion of the new ‘impulse trigger’ motors. The Xbox One controller still has rumble feedback in the grips, but the introduction of rumble in the triggers is a brilliant move, best enjoyed in Forza 5 where the rumbling on the accelerator and the brake adds more than you might think to the feeling of immersion. 

Sony PS4 Review 2013

Sony PS4 review

What is the Sony PS4?

The PS4 is the console Sony hopes will wipe the floor with the Xbox One and right the wrongs of the PS3's troubled childhood. Indeed, as is noted in our in-depth Xbox One review, it feels as if roles are reversed this generation. The Xbox 360 was the 'gamers console' while the PS3 was a living room trojan horse with a Blu-ray drive on-board. It helped Sony win the disc format wars, but the result was an overpriced, overcomplicated console that surrendered Sony's once dominant position.

Sony eventually realised its mistakes and recent exclusives like Uncharted, God of War, the Last of Us and indie greats like Journey has seen it regain some of the faith it lost. Sony seems intent on not forgetting what games consoles are about, though that's not to say it has no interest in the softer, entertainment features espoused by its music and video services. Just like Microsoft, Sony is in the business of creating an ecosystem to rival Apple, Google and Amazon.

When it launches in the UK on 29 November, it will be time to decide whether to spend £350 on a PS4, £429 on a Xbox One or wait it out till things get a bit cheaper. Our gut says wait, but it's clear that picking these two consoles apart is very difficult indeed.

Sony PS4: Design

When the PS3 launched in 2006 it was a humongous, monolithic beast of a thing. It was the George Foreman grill of consoles. The smaller and slimmer iterations that followed were far more suitable to park underneath a TV and thankfully the same can be said of the PS4.

Much was made of Sony’s decision to put software ahead of hardware when it first announced the PS4, and it’s clear there was nothing to worry about. The PS4 is small, svelte and much better looking than all three iterations of the PS3.

The curves have now gone replaced with a sleeker, more angled design. It looks a bit like two slim Sony Blu-ray decks sat on top each other, then slightly moved apart to give it that more edgy look. It still has the same matte plastic used on the PS3 Slim, but adds a thick glossy black strip that prevents it from being just another boring black box.

The gloss and matte is separated by a thin status light bar that flashes blue then white when the console is on. It reaches down to the front of the console where you will find the Blu-ray/DVD disc tray and standby buttons discreetly hidden. Indeed, they are so discreetly concealed you can barely see them at first and they only need the lightest of touches to activate.

There’s also two USB 3.0 ports to connect the DualShock 4 controllers up front and around the back there’s ports for the same kettle power lead used with the PS3 Slim, an optical digital output, HDMI, Ethernet and a dedicated port for the PlayStation 4 camera. It’s strictly all digital on the connection front for Sony this generation.

At 275mm wide, 53mm high and 305mm long, the PS4’s dimensions are smaller on all fronts in comparison to the original PS3 and the PS3 Slim. At 2.8kg, it’s also roughly the same weight as the PS3 Super Slim (2.9kg) and the 250GB Xbox 360 consoles (2.9kg). Having had our hands on the Xbox One (333mm x 78mm x 274mm), the PS4 is significantly the smaller of the two next-gen consoles. That's definitely a good thing.

Sony PS4: Specs

So now to the technical part. Like the Xbox One, the PS4 features architecture already available inside PCs. Both share the same AMD-based, low power 8-core CPU and the Sony console has a 2.5-inch laptop-style 500GB hard drive that can be upgraded and replaced. Sony’s CPU clocks in at 1.6GHz while the Xbox One has been raised to a slightly faster 1.75GHz. What it means is that both consoles have plenty of cores to handle intensive multitasking and cope with the new entertainment-focused features.

To help lighten the processing load, the PS4 also has a Radeon HD 7000-series GPU with 8GB GDDR5 RAM. The PS4’s GPU runs at 800MHz and has 18 compute units compared to the Xbox One’s 853MHz GPU with a 12 CU count. The PS4's advantage is further cemented by the simpler to use and faster system memory. Both have 8GB of RAM, but the PS4 has 5500MHz GDDR5 RAM compared to the Xbox One’s 2133MHz GDDR3 RAM. This gives the PS4 a serious advantage in memory bandwidth, even if the Xbox One compensates a little by using a 32MB cache of super-fast ESRAM.

Without getting too bogged down in the numbers, the bottom line is the PS4 has more graphics grunt than the Xbox One. This is a straightforward fact. The debate lies in what this means in practice. At present it means cross-platform games enjoy a slight edge on the PS4, reinforcing the idea that the PS4 is the more hardcore gamer friendly of the two machines.

Of course, it’s down to game developers to take advantage of the extra power and day one patches are set to boost games like Call of Duty: Ghosts and Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag up to native 1080p resolution on the PS4. Naturally Sony fans will hope games will look noticeably better on the PS4, but it's more likely that PS4 exclusives will unlock the extra power than third-party titles.

In general use, the UI is slick, the console boots up nice and fast, and you don’t have to wait painfully long for game installations and updates. Games look gorgeous. It’s more noticeable on games like Call of Duty: Ghosts and Killzone: Shadow Fall where there is definitely a bump up in detail, sharpness and the lighting. Aside from disc loading, the PS4 is a quiet machine that generates very little fan noise and is a far cry from the racket the original PS3 used to generate.

The fact the PS4 achieves this in a smaller body than the Xbox One and with the power supply built-in is an impressive feat. The paranoid part of us worries about overheating, but (at present) there's no evidence to suggest this is anything more than that.