Haven’t you heard? There is a console war being waged right now. Fans of specific brands are hunkering down in their forts and lobbing bombs at each other over minor victories while everyone searches for the best console so that we can all just give up and know that we are either inherently right or inherently wrong. Next week Square Enix will release a next-gen version of last year’s Tomb Raider which features a higher resolution, more cool particle and lighting effects and better texture and bump mapping.
Never mind the fact that Tomb Raider is available for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 already and that it’s pretty cheap, or that it’s already available on PC for probably cheaper (I think I picked it up for about $10), it will be launching next Tuesday for the full price of $59.99 as it is a “next gen remake” of a game that a lot of people have probably already played. The thing is, neither console has a lot going on for it, so this is a pretty big deal.
The big news surrounding the Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition is that it was confirmed this week that it will run on both consoles above 30 frames per second. The controversy is that it has been confirmed to run at 60 frames per second on the PlayStation 4 while the topic has been avoided for the Xbox One. This doesn’t come as much of a shock if you’ve been paying attention as games released on both consoles have had some minor differences, with games on the Xbox One being lower resolution (but claimed to be full 1080p due to upscaling) or running at a lower framerate than the PlayStation 4. A big part of this has to do with the Xbox One’s Kinect taking up so much video memory.
For a lot of fans this has meant that the PlayStation 4 is clearly the better console, as it can run games at a higher resolution and a higher frame rate, but it’s still kind of up in the air as it is very, very early on into the generation. I mean, both systems have similar specs which line up with your average PC gamer’s PC. According to Square Enix anything beyond 30FPS is just gravy, okay? So Xbox One might run at 35fps and PS4 might run at 55fps, but it’s still gravy. [Source]
