Choosing the most powerful console of each generation has not always been as easy as it is now. In the 1990s, when the real console boom took place, we relied on the specialized press to discover the keys to each new system that hit the market. The Internet did not work at the current level, and obviously, the paper had very important disadvantages that prevented us from being really up to date.
The technical analysis had a great boom at that time, but it did not always offer the necessary precision or clarity and was sometimes "dressed" with a touch of marketing that made the user end up absorbing some ideas that were not true. For example, it was not uncommon to see, at that time, people who believed that Neo Geo was a 24-bit console, or who thought that Atari Jaguar was a 64-bit system. Even if we move to a more recent era, there are still people who think that the PS2 was the most powerful console of its generation, a serious mistake since it was, precisely, the opposite.
I know that there are still many doubts around this issue and that unfortunately many myths persist that continue to be fueled by the fanaticism of some users. You already know the saying, a lie that is repeated many times can end up disguised as the truth, and that is what has happened for decades with different generations of consoles, in fact, the struggle between consoles and the PC is not something new. The youngest will think that it was something that arose with the arrival of PS4 and Xbox One, or perhaps with PS3 and Xbox 360, but nothing could be further from the truth.
In general, the "war" between the consoles and the PC began to be quite marked with the arrival of PS1, Sega Saturn, and Nintendo 64, three consoles that competed in the same generation. PS1 played with the advantage of having a very powerful graphics unit, which allowed it to offer 3D acceleration and create a multitude of effects, but in reality, it was behind any PC based on a Pentium 133 MHz or more with 16 MB of RAM and a half-decent 3D accelerator.
You do not believe it? Well, someone, who checked it first-hand tells you, since Resident Evil, without going any further, worked wonderfully on a 133 MHz Pentium with 16 MB of RAM and an S3 Virge 3D. However, it is true that optimization, and custom developments, made a difference in favor of consoles.
However, I am not going to discuss in-depth that "war" between the consoles and the PC on a historical level, that is not the objective of this article. We are going to focus on discovering, in a totally impartial and realistic way, which was the most powerful console of each generation, following the temporal order that we all know, and starting from the 8-bit era. We hope you enjoy reading this article as much as I have enjoyed doing it. Make yourself comfortable, let's get started.
What was the most powerful console in the 8-bit generation?
Although the undisputed winner, by sales and worldwide success, was Nintendo's NES, known as Famicom in the Japanese market, the truth is that this console was much less powerful than its main rival, the SEGA Master System. I was lucky enough to enjoy both systems at the time, and the differences between the two were very great.
Master System was the most powerful console of its generation, although it was also a clear example that power is not the only important thing when we talk about video game systems. NES had a huge, varied, and quality game catalog, where franchises as important as Double Dragon, Shadow Warriors (Ninja Gaiden), Super Mario Bros, and Zelda, among others, shone with their own light.
At the hardware level, the NES had a Ricoh 2A07 8-bit 1.66MHz processor, 2KB of RAM, and 2KB of video, and had a 48-color palette. For its part, Master System used an 8-bit Zilog Z80 at 4 MHz, had 8 KB of RAM, 16 KB of video, and a 64-color palette.
16-bit generation: the most powerful console was the least sold, and the most expensive
Although the 16-bit generation was dominated by two consoles, the SEGA Mega Drive and the Big N Super Nintendo, the truth is that there was a third player who also had quite a pull. We are talking about SNK, a company dedicated mainly to arcades that set an important goal with its Neo Geo AES console: to bring the arcade experience to the living room of our home, we always had the money to pay for that experience.
Neo Geo AES was a dream console that a whole generation fell in love with, including myself. Its launch price was around 80,000 pesetas, but I got to see it in its first stage with prices of up to 99,000 pesetas. At the current exchange rate, this is almost 600 euros. Although this console had a 16-bit architecture, its power was much higher than that offered by Mega Drive and Super Nintendo, and yes, it became without a doubt the most powerful console of that generation.
The Neo Geo AES had a Motorola 68000 CPU, like the Mega Drive, but running at 12 MHz and not 7.61 MHz. As a secondary chip, it also integrated a Zilog Z80 at 4 MHz. Its graphics and sound system, and its color palette, played directly in another league. It was prepared to work with huge sprites and with zoom effects, it could display up to three scrolling planes at the same time, and it could display up to 4,096 colors on the screen (Mega Drive and Super Nintendo only reached 128 and 256, respectively).
PS1 was not the most powerful console of its generation, but it swept sales thanks to its game catalog
The time frame in which the fifth generation consoles are located is quite wide and was marked by the arrival of a large number of systems that, in the end, passed, for the most part, with more pain than glory (3DO, Atari Jaguar, Apple Pippin, Virtual Boy, AmigaCD32, etc.).
Three were the great players of this generation: Sega Saturn, PlayStation, and Nintendo 64. The first was designed as an eminently 2D machine, and despite the adjustments that SEGA tried to introduce at the last minute, after learning about Sony's commitment to 3D with PlayStation, it could not cope with it. Saturn was a powerful machine, but with a very difficult dual-CPU architecture to exploit. PlayStation, with its unique CPU and 3D-accelerated graphics core, was much more versatile and affordable.
We might think that PlayStation was the most powerful of this generation, but we would be totally wrong. Nintendo 64 was the most powerful console of the fifth generation. It is true that Nintendo missed the mark by opting for the cartridge instead of the CD, but said console was on another level. Its 93.75 MHz 64-bit RISC R4300i processor gave the PlayStation's 32-bit 33.86 MHz RISC R3000A soups, and the same was true of its GPU, developed by Silicon Graphics and capable of moving up to 500,000 polygons with texture (PlayStation moved 180,000 textured polygons ).
PS2, along with Dreamcast, was the least powerful console of its generation, but it was also the best-selling
If there is a generation that was loaded with misinformation, and unfortunately the fault of this was mainly in the media of the time, it was the (misnamed) generation of 128 bits. This had the participation of four players: Dreamcast, from SEGA, PlayStation 2, from Sony; GameCube, from Nintendo; and Xbox, from Microsoft.
Dreamcast was the first to arrive, but it was also the least powerful, as it had an SH-4 RISC CPU with a 200 MHz 128-bit FPU, 16 MB of RAM, 8 MB of graphics memory and its GPU was an NEC PowerVR2 ( similar to a 3DFX Voodoo 2 ) at 100 MHz, capable of handling up to 6 million polygons with lighting and textures. PS2 came next, and surpassed Dreamcast in raw power, thanks to its Emotion Engine RISC MIPS-IV R5900 CPU at 294.9 MHz, its 32 MB of RAM, and its graphics chip at 147.45 MHz, capable of handling up to 25 million. of polygons with textures and effects.
The GameCube made both of them "ridiculous" in terms of power, as it featured a 485 MHz PowerPC CPU with advanced instructions and a custom ATI-designed GPU that was capable of 162 MHz and could handle up to 33 MHz. millions of polygons with textures and effects. Its power was 9.4 GFLOPs, while PS2 was 6.2 GFLOPs.
Xbox was, without a doubt, the most powerful console of this generation, reaching power of (attention, that is coming curve) 20 GFLOPs. Its CPU was an Intel Pentium based on the architecture of the Pentium III, which ran at 733 MHz. It had 64 MB of RAM and mounted a GeForce 3 GPU customized by NVIDIA.
PS3 and Xbox 360: a very close generation: What was the most powerful console?
The seventh-generation was, without a doubt, the most competitive in terms of power, although in terms of sales, Wii was the absolute winner, quite an achievement since this console was by far the least powerful of the three systems. that competed in that generation.
Xbox 360 and PS3 offered a fairly similar level of performance despite the differences they presented at the architectural level, but strictly speaking, Xbox 360 was the most powerful of that generation, not only for power but also for the successes that were achieved. Microsoft marked when choosing the configuration of components of said system.
In gross power, Xbox 360 reached 240 GFLOPs, while PS3 was 230.4 GFLOPs. Beyond the GFLOPs, the Microsoft console had a more advanced GPU designed by ATI, which adopted a configuration based on unified shaders (240 in total), while the PS3 maintained the division between pixels and vertex shaders since it integrated a GPU based on the NVIDIA GeForce 7800 design.
We should also keep in mind that Xbox 360 used a configuration of 512 MB of unified memory, while PS3 separated 256 MB for the system and 256 MB for the GPU. Its bandwidth was also slightly lower. There is no doubt, the Microsoft console was the most powerful of this generation.
Microsoft did not hit with Xbox One and Sony achieved an important victory with PS4
Unfortunately, Microsoft failed to maintain the successes it had garnered in the previous two generations, and with Xbox One it made very serious mistakes. This console lagged far behind PS4, both in its unified memory configuration and in its GPU, although it managed to slightly outperform it in CPU performance, thanks to the last-minute frequency hike that Microsoft carried out.
Xbox One uses 8 GB of unified DDR3 memory on a 256-bit bus, it has a bandwidth of 68.22 GB / s, although it can reach peaks of 192 GB / s thanks to its 32 MB of ESRAM, it mounts a CPU Jaguar 8 cores at 1.75 GHz and has a Radeon GCN GPU with 768 shaders, 48 texturing units, and 16 raster units.
In contrast, PS4 has 8 GB of GDDR5 unified on a 256-bit bus, which leaves us with a bandwidth of 176 GB / s. Its CPU is a Jaguar with 8 cores at 1.66 GHz and it has a Radeon GCN GPU with 1,152 shaders, 72 texturing units and 32 raster units.
There is no doubt that PS4 was the most powerful console of the last generation, although if we put PS4 Pro and Xbox One X into the equation, the latter would become the most powerful system since it integrates a more advanced Radeon GCN GPU with 2,560 shaders, 160 texture units, 32 raster units, 2.3 GHz 8-core Jaguar CPU and has 12 GB of unified GDDR5 memory on a 384-bit bus, which leaves us with a bandwidth of 326.4 GB / s.
And what is the most powerful console of the current generation?
The console more powerful than exists right now is Xbox X Series. Microsoft learned a valuable lesson from the Xbox One skid and did very well with Xbox One X. This gave it a good dose of experience and helped it hit the nail on the head with Xbox Series X, a console that outperforms without problems to PS5 in raw power, and that it presents a very good hardware configuration, especially if we take into account its recommended retail price.
PS5 has a controller that integrates more advanced technologies and has a much faster SSD, but Xbox Series X has a slightly faster CPU and has a more powerful GPU that also integrates full support of all functions advanced RDNA 2 architecture from AMD, which is not the case on PS5, as Microsoft itself confirmed at the time. We are going to see the specifications of both consoles so that you can compare them for yourselves.
Specifications of Xbox Series X, the most powerful console on the market
- 3.8 GHz Zen 2 processor with 8 active cores and SMT disabled. With SMT activated it moves 16 threads but works at 3.6 GHz. It is a trimmed version of Zen 2, which is closer to Zen in raw performance.
- Semi-custom Radeon RDNA 2 GPU with 3,328 shaders, 208 texturing units and 80 raster units at 1,825 MHz with a power of 12.15 TFLOPs.
- 52 units for hardware-accelerated ray tracing.
- 16 GB of unified GDDR6 memory on a 320-bit bus: 10 GB with a bandwidth of 560 GB / s and 6 GB with a bandwidth of 336 GB / s.
- 1TB 2.4GB / s NVME SSD.
- 4K Blu-ray disc reader.
- 3D sound chip.
- Target performance: 4K and 60 FPS (120 FPS possible), according to Microsoft.
Specifications of PS5, the second most powerful console that exists
- Zen 2 3.5 GHz processor (maximum dynamic frequency) with 8 active cores and SMT disabled. With SMT activated, it moves 16 wires, but at lower frequencies. It's a trimmed version of Zen 2, which is closer to Zen in raw performance.
- Semi-custom Radeon RDNA 2 GPU with 2,304 shaders, 144 texturing units and 64 raster units at 2,233 MHz with a power of up to 10.29 TFLOPs.
- 36 units for hardware-accelerated ray tracing.
- 16GB of unified GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus with a bandwidth of 448GB / s
- 825GB NVME SSD at 5.5GB / s.
- 4K Blu-ray disc reader.
- Tempest sound chip.
- Target performance: 4K and 60 FPS (120 FPS possible), according to Sony.
It will be interesting to see how long Sony and Microsoft take to launch improved versions of both consoles, especially now that we have already been able to confirm that both are drowning in ray tracing and that they are far from all that "hype" that was generated around of both, and that he dared to assume that they would perform like a top-of-the-range PC with the RTX 2080 Ti and Ryzen 7 3700X. It was clear that it was not going to be like that, but what can we say, creating smoke helps generate myths, and this helps to sell.
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