PS4, Xbox One Hardware Performance Gap Will Never Narrow, Says Oddworld CEO

A while back there was an interview with Just Add Water's highly outspoken developer Lorne Lanning. In the interview it was interpreted that the “performance gap” between the PS4 and Xbox One would narrow. This is not true. The CEO of Just Add Water, the company behind the Oddworld games, has come forward to clarify the situation.

The original interview came from Xbox Achievements, where they interpreted Lanning's comments about the gap thinning between the two eighth gen consoles as something that would happen over time. However, CEO Stewart Gilray spoke with Worlds Factory to clear up those statements, saying...

“Actually that is NOT what he said. I spoke to Lorne afterwards and what he meant when speaking to that guy was that budgets, schedules and perceivable differences would narrow, NOT that the Xbox One performance is improving to align with PS4, that is just physically impossible. The PS4 has MORE COMPUTE units, and faster memory and a whole bunch of things, that would make that physically impossible to happen.”

That makes a heck of a lot of sense considering that – as Gilray mentions – you can't make physically weaker hardware better performing (or equal performing) to higher grade hardware. Like he says... it's impossible.

Of course, Lanning's misinterpreted quotes didn't stop the fanboys (and to an extent, Microsoft) from leveraging the comments with propaganda for the Xbox One's resurgence in the market thanks to things like better software tools and a new SDK to improve the ESRAM performance. This was also furthered along with development buzzwords like “tiled resources” (which isn't a miracle 1080p feature by the way; it's just a better way to buffer and load assets) and big announcements about DirectX 12 being some sort of heaven-send to excel the Xbox One to new console gaming heights.

Sorry to MisterXMedia followers: it's all a pipe dream.

The PS4 outdoes the Xbox One in the CPU benchmarks, in the resolution benchmarks, in the graphics benchmarks and in terms of overall hardware capabilities thanks to its unified 8GB of shared GDDR5 memory.

While the new software kits and development tools will help in the long run with optimizing games and apps on the Xbox One, it's not going to magically make it on par in performance to the PlayStation 4. Even more than that, Sony will also be releasing newer and better tools as well, so it's not as if the Xbox One's optimization will be happening in a vacuum where competitive console advancements don't exist.

Heck, even the Wii U recently received a firmware update to improve the system's appeal, so much so that even big sites like Kotaku had to renege from the spinning wheel of Nintendoom to admit that the console can output some amazing looking graphics. That's Nintendo spreading some of that secret sauce all over the faces of the naysayers.

What Gilrey says, though, will apply for the entirety of this generation. What this means is that the Xbox One will always trail behind the PS4 in terms of technological performance... like a busboy carrying a dignitary's luggage.

(Main image courtesy of Sonifys)

Will Usher

Staff Writer at CinemaBlend.