The PlayStation 4 GPU is 4.5x more powerful than the PS3 GPU, and 7.5x more powerful than the Xbox 360 GPU
Sony revealed additional details about the PlayStation 4 hardware shortly after yesterday’s event. The GPU is custom made by AMD and is based on the Radeon 7000-series desktop graphics cards. It’s capable of 1.84 TFLOPS of processing power.
The PlayStation 3 “Reality Synthesizer” GPU had a peak performance of 400 Gigaflops, which makes the PlayStation 4 GPU about 4.5x more powerful. Once you factor in the new features of the GPU, it’s highly likely that it’s even more powerful than the raw data suggests.
The Xbox 360 “Xenos” graphics processor is rated at 240 Gigaflops, which would make the PS4 GPU about 7.5x more powerful.
In addition to being a lot more powerful than previous generations, the PlayStation 4 GPU includes a lot of new features that can help off load some of the CPU tasks. For example, physics can now easily be done on the GPU, as Sony showcased during yesterday’s event.
The PlayStation 4 also has access to a lot more RAM than the PS3 and Xbox 360: 8 GB of unified DDR5 memory, compared to just 512 MB in the older consoles.
In order to make the new hardware even more effective, Sony has equipped the PS4 with a secondary chip to handle background tasks. This frees up more resources for games and apps. From a hardware point, the PlayStation 4 is definitely a true next-gen system.