EA: Xbox One and PS4 "are a generation ahead of the highest end PC on the market"

Rajat Taneja, the executive VP and CTO of EA, has made a quite remarkable claim about the power of the upcoming next-generation.

It all begins with the raw horsepower of the platform which catalyses the imagination and will power the next wave of innovation in entertainment,” he wrote on LinkedIn.

Both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 have adopted electronics and an integrated systems-on-a-chip architecture that unleashes magnitudes more compute and graphics power than the current generation of consoles.

These architectures are a generation ahead of the highest end PC on the market and their unique design of the hardware, the underlying operating system and the live service layer create one of the most compelling platforms to reimagine game mechanics. Our benchmarks on just the video and audio performance are 8-10 times superior to the current gen.”

Of course, those who have been following the analysis of the PS4 and Xbox One hardware will know that this is at best a stretch and at worst an outright lie.

Existing graphics cards from the Nvidia 600 series and Radeon 7000 series outstrip both machines by quite some margin. Nvidia’s new 700 series, said to be arriving later today, will widen this gap even further.

It’s certainly the case that any high-end” gaming rig built on a budget of 500 will provide users with raw technical performance way beyond what we’re seeing in the next-generation of consoles.

Of course, one could argue that the software, UI and architecture of the new machines give them an advantage. Although it would be a hard argument to win.

In fact, Taneja’s analysis of Microsoft’s Xbox One reveal is perhaps the most positive we’ve read.

As a long-time Microsoft employee and now the CTO of EA, I found yesterday’s unveiling of the new Xbox One exciting on a few different levels,” he added. Following on the footsteps of Sony’s announcement of the new PlayStation 4, these new technologies finally raise the curtain on the next generation of interactive entertainment.

This is a significant inflection point in the history of our industry. One that is as profound as the introduction of smartphones or Facebook to the market. Video games are about to become a medium like you’ve never seen.

For example, in the real world, when an athlete takes the field or court during a playoff game and the crowd is going wild, they feed off of that energy and it impacts how they perform. With our next gen game engines, the crowd energy, weather and player behaviour will all impact how your gameplay unfolds. The technology powering these games takes realism to a whole new level.

These next-gen platforms create dynamic, living worlds. Your game could change overnight depending on actions by other gamers around the globe. Your player stats and information can be updated in real time with real-world player stats and injury reports. These consoles are also inherently more social – something that didn’t matter much when the last consoles came out eight years ago.

It’s an exciting time to be in this space at this moment in history.”