Toy retail giant, Toys R Us may have spilled the beans on the release dates for the next-gen consoles from both Microsoft and Sony. Toys R Us has since removed them, but the company’s site briefly showed release dates for both systems.
According to Toys R US, the Xbox One is set to hit shelves on November 29, with the PlayStation 4 following on December 13. Sony nor Microsoft have commented on the leak, but these dates do seem plausible. Microsoft stated at E3 that its Xbox One would drop in November, and Sony gave a slightly more vague time frame of Q4 2013 for its PS4.
If the leak proves true, Microsoft would have a small timing advantage over Sony. The Xbox one would have a 2 week head start out of the gate for the holiday season. While that’s probably not enough to make a big difference in the console wars, it could give Microsoft an early boost.
The basic PS4 will retail for $399, and the Xbox One for $499 (including the required Kinect peripheral). They were both unveiled at earlier this year, with the details being locked down at Microsoft and Sony’s respective E3 showing. The two champions of the next console war are fairly evenly matched, though Microsoft stirred up some bad blood early on with its unpopular DRM policies (since changed).
Technically, the two machines are comparable. Both sport eight-core processors, 8GB of RAM, custom AMD graphics chips, and Blu-ray drives. There is a difference in the two GPUs, however. Both use AMD’s latest Graphics Core Next architecture, which is divided into working blocks known as Compute Units. But the PS4 version has 18 CUs generating 1.84 teraflops of processing power, while the Xbox one has only 12 CUs. So, theoretically the PS4 has a 50% advantage in terms of raw shader performance (for example, lighting and other graphics effects). What real impact this will have on graphics remains to be seen, however.
[Via: The Inquirer]