The Console Decoding Guide

When it comes to video game consoles, potential purchasers seldom know what to expect. New console releases often overwhelm them with a jumble of specifications and technical nuances. These additional items can even give the impression that a veritable host of numbers somehow overshadows a console’s features and benefits. Potential buyers seek clarity, but information is hard to come by if your console accompanies a “read me” first booklet that is two pages long and largely subservient to the numerals.

Gaming Console Specs

For most consumers, understanding video game console specifications is a confusing and confounding experience. Console makers don’t use the plainest of language when describing the technology behind their products. Terms like “teraflop,” “clock speed,” and “GPU architecture” aren’t exactly consumer-friendly, and they leave many a potential video game console buyer—well—confused.

And even if one does understand the language of the console, there’s still the problem of what an across-the-board console specification change from generation to generation might actually mean to real gaming performance.

What console specs really matter?

When companies promote their latest gaming console, it is easy to see why confusion ensues among gamers. They are led to believe that something extraordinary has happened once again, that their gaming experience is going to be revolutionized yet again.

So what does the basic architecture of a console say about its potential performance? To answer this, I’ll use terms and concepts that should be pretty familiar to PC gamers and builders.

GPU

The graphics processing unit, or GPU, is the part of any gaming console most responsible for delivering stunning visuals. It handles the gruelling task of rendering not only the graphics but also many of the effects that give a game’s world depth and dimension—if you’re seeing something in a console game, it’s most likely because of the GPU. There’s a pretty fundamental difference between what happens when a game runs on a CPU versus a GPU, and we’re fond of pointing out what that difference is. Another way to evaluate a GPU’s performance is through teraflops.

Additionally, rendering is a task that falls under the GPU’s umbrella. It, too, is parallelizable and scales nicely from a few to a large number of processors, mainly because computing each pixel’s appearance is an independent operation. The GPU doesn’t just do this for 3D video game worlds but also for any 3D situation—such as a cut scene—in which a character interacts with a game’s narrative. Like the CPU, the GPU’s performance isn’t tied to its clock speed. Instead, it is contingent upon how many operations it can perform in parallel at any given moment.

For gamers who stutter, playing fast-action games—like racing or first-person shooter games—can be supremely difficult and frustrating. Why? Because these games tend not to look or feel good when played at game-breaking frame rates, which makes them effectively unplayable.

CPU

The console’s central processing unit, or CPU, acts as the command center of sorts, executing directives and keeping all events in a well-mannered sequence. If a system has a brain, then the CPU must be it. Everything in a modern video game seems to be controlled—driven—by the commands executed in the console’s CPU. There is a lot going on at once, and these driving elements are responsible for ensuring that modern video games look good, sound good, and function well.

The term “driving elements” refers to the individual cores of a console. The graphics core accomplishes what its name implies; it drives the visuals. However, a console’s audio component has correlative importance and is just as busily engaged in the work of driving the visuals. The visuals and the audio must come together in a seamless way. In the path we will be tracing through a console’s architecture, we will see that this is accomplished by a fantastic deal of multitasking.

What Really Drives Console Performance?

How much data can a console process in a specific amount of time? That’s what we mean by “throughput.” This term encompasses any factor that influences load times or system responsiveness. When we look at a console’s ability to handle tasks, we’re often expecting to see numbers that are comparable to what’s inside a decent gaming PC.

So, how many gigabytes of RAM does your PlayStation have? The answer is 8 GB. How many gigabytes of RAM does your Xbox have? The answer is 8GB, although some people believe it’s actually 9.

In addition, the types of storage have a pronounced effect on throughput. Compared with traditional internal drives, solid-state drives (SSDs) work much more quickly and offer much better performance, coming very near to satisfying the demand for a completely seamless gaming experience. A drive may come with up to 1 TB of storage, but this alone does not always guarantee the throughput and performance necessary to keep everything running smoothly. By contrast, the highest bandwidth available—particularly under Wi-Fi conditions—ensures totally unrestricted data transmission.

Understanding the crucial specifications of gaming consoles is crucial to simplify the decision-making process. One should direct attention first and foremost to the graphics processing unit (GPU), which is responsible for producing not only the game’s look but also its physics and interaction—the graphics quality in gaming parlance. Second, consider the central processing unit (CPU), which affects not only the overall performance of the gaming console but also the performance and interaction of non-player characters and other elements of artificial intelligence.