By now, even if you don’t consider yourself a hardware nerd, you probably know that the PlayStation 4 is significantly more powerful than the Xbox One. So now we’re going to change the conversation a bit, and discuss how much more powerful the PS4 is than the PS2. According to Sony (which produced the infographic pictured above), thanks to the PS4′s eight-core CPU, it has 43 times the processing power of the PS2! Of course, this is a completely meaningless comparison — so let’s dive in and look at things in a slightly more rational manner.
For a start, the PS4 has an AMD APU with eight Jaguar CPU cores, and an 18-core (1152 shaders) HD 7870-class GPU. (Read our PS4 vs. Xbox One story for a detailed comparison of their hardware specs.) The PS2 had a 300MHz massively parallel (for its time) CPU, dubbed the Emotion Engine, that’s hard to compare to the Jaguar CPU. The GPU — the Graphics Synthesizer — was clocked at 150MHz, with a wide pipeline and huge memory buses, but again it’s hard to directly compare it to any commercial GPUs that were shipping at the time (~2000, GeForce 2 era). In terms of actual gaming image quality, the PS2 produced visuals that were somewhere between DirectX 7 and 8. If you ever played some of the later PS2 games, like God of War 2 or Metal Gear Solid 3, you will appreciate that the PS2 was no slouch. Some people even argue that the PS2′s pixel fill rate was higher than the PS3.
PS2 (SCPH-30001) motherboard. The original EE and GS were pretty beastly chips.
Now, in terms of pure megahertz, yes, the PS4′s CPU — 8 cores at 1.6GHz = 12800MHz — is 43 times as fast as the PS2. The PS4′s GPU, with 1152 shaders, 32 pixel pipelines, and a fill rate of around 30 gigapixels per second, is only between two and 10 times faster than the PS2. On aggregate, once you factor in the CPU cores being used for other tasks, the PS4 is perhaps only a few times faster than the PS2.
Most of the PS4′s functionality is contained within a single chip, the APU
In case you were wondering, depending on how you look at it, the PS4 is only marginally more powerful than the PS3 — but again, due to the PS3′s hyper-specialized architecture, it’s hard to draw a direct comparison. It has never really made sense to compare two systems by their megahertz — it’s just a convenient crutch that marketers have unfortunately abused for way too long. Fortunately, that’s why you have websites like ExtremeTech to cut through the crap and tell you what’s really going on behind the scenes.
Really, when comparing video game consoles, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Raw performance is one thing — but it’s how you use that performance is what really matters. It’s also very important to look at other factors, too; even if the PS4 was slower than the PS2 and PS3, its games would still look better because of HDMI, the richer APIs of DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4, and myriad other features that simply didn’t exist 10+ years ago.
And now, after that brief segue into the history of gaming consoles and murky depths of marketing, back to our usual programming: Will this week’s release of Titanfall be enough to close the widening gap between PS4 and Xbox One sales?
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