Sony on Xbox One X power: Devs will work to the lowest common denominator

PlayStation platform holder Sony has said that the Xbox One X’s power advantage over PS4 Pro will likely not be as evident as some suspect.

The current high-end PS4 Pro boasts an eight core 2.1GHz CPU, a GPU with 36 911MHz compute units and 8GB of GDDR5 RAM. The Xbox One X, on the other hand, boasts an eight core 2.3GHx CPU, a GPU with 40 1172GHz compute units and 12GB of GDDR5.

In all, that means while PS4 Pro packs 4.2 teraflops of power, the new Xbox has 6 teraflops.

Speaking to Eurogamer, however, Jim Ryan said that he would expect most developers to scale up only as high as the PS4 Pro.

Cast our minds back to the PS3 generation, where we had on paper more impressive specifications than our competition, and in some areas by quite a considerable margin. Now, that didn’t play out the way we had anticipated it would,” he explained.

What happened was that developers, maybe at the behest of publishers, developed up to the lowest common denominator and stopped there. Very few cases took advantage of the additional horsepower of the PS3.

You only do one set of work. You don’t do one set of work to get up to one level and then a different amount of work and consequently may need to go further.”

I’m a big believer of learning lessons from history. History doesn’t always repeat itself. But if you’re a publisher of video games, that is a perfectly commercially rational approach for you to take.”

Ryan also dismissed the suggestion that Sony will be actively instructing partners to ensure Xbox One X releases will not perform technically better than PS4 Pro, adding: I think you’re trying to see some sort of nefarious platform-holder activity where likely none exists.”