Next-gen is now this-gen, and the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are armed for a true head-to-head battle.

Next-gen is now this-gen. The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 arrived around a year ago and have had that time to both deal with various launch problems and build up their game libraries. If you want to get a new video game system, these two are the frontrunners of the current generation, with several years of games ahead of them and loads of new hardware and features. We put the Xbox One and PS4 against each other in a variety of categories to determine which system comes out on top. From a broad gameplay perspective, the Nintendo Wii U also deserves your attention, but for now let's look at the two big technical powerhouses of this generation.

Price

The PS4 was the frontrunner in this category at launch, because the Xbox One with Kinect retailed (and still retails) for $500. However, since then Microsoft has launched a Kinect-free version of the Xbox One and given it the same $400 price tag as the PS4. So, for sheer console pricing, the systems are tied. This changes a bit when you look at the premium subscription services that go with them, which makes the PS4 stay ahead of the Xbox One by a hair, and only in terms of pricing. Sony's once-0 edge has since been slashed to just .

Both Microsoft and Sony offer premium subscriptions to their online services. Xbox users can get a year of Xbox Live Gold for , and PlayStation users can get a year of PS Plus for $50. For both systems, this premium service is required to play multiplayer games online, and now neither system requires the extra subscription to watch media services.

Winner: PlayStation 4 (Just Barely)

Hardware

Now that both systems are out, arguing about the technical specifications seems moot. On paper, the PlayStation 4 has a slight edge thanks to using GDDR5 RAM instead of the DDR3 RAM used in the Xbox One, but besides that their hardware is incredibly similar. Both have 8-core AMD CPUs, 8GB of memory, 500GB internal hard drives, and Blu-ray optical drives.

Because of differing architectures and operating systems, benchmarking and directly comparing the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 is effectively impossible. They're so similar we can't declare one to be superior based on specs, and they're different enough that we can't directly compare performance. At this point, it's up to developers to get the most out of either console, and whether one truly shines as more powerful will only be revealed with new games and how they perform. Different games might run at 720p or 1080p, or 30fps or 60fps, between the different systems. But there's no single, set winner here.

Source: www.pcmag.com