Sony and Microsoft are both surging their way forward with new offerings in their respective console divisions. Earlier this year, Microsoft revealed their updated version of the Xbox One titled Xbox One S and also confirmed their upcoming console named Project Scorpio, now during their event in New York, Sony officially announced their upgraded version of PS4, which is a slimmer version of PS4 and also unveiled their upcoming console named PS4 Pro, which was earlier codenamed ‘PS4 Neo’.
It seems like the competition would be quite fierce as both the players would try to promote their products to reach out to potential consumers. It will be something to keep an eye on. While Sony’s PlayStation has always had an edge over its Microsoft counterpart in terms of popularity, Microsoft is trying to escalate its game as they just posted this.
The study was conducted by an independent research firm named IHS Markit. The firm compared the consoles’ network performances keeping in notice various factors like reliability, speed and overall quality. They focused their measure on “the core network performance delivered by each side during full-blown gameplay.” The study was reported carried out both in a controlled lab setting and “real-world environment where gamers live and play.” The Just Noticeable Difference (JND) method was used for the analysis.
With two-step logging in process and frequent outages, PlayStation Network lagged behind Xbox Live. Xbox Live came out as the victor in almost all categories but one, PlayStation Network reportedly has a better matchmaking (matching a player’s opponent in accordance to their skill level) service.
Xbox even came out as a more reliable source as the report read, “Xbox Live outperformed PlayStation Network on three out of four metrics. In particular, Xbox Live delivered a considerably better score on the metrics for login time to network and for login time to game servers.”
In the ‘Speed’ analysis phase, Xbox Live toppled PlayStation Network at metrics like ingame lag, login time and game loading time and friends.
Finally in the overall section, the report crowned Xbox Live over PlayStation Network and ended it with this anecdote, “In the majority of scenarios for the Overall Quality category, the metrics were recorded in milliseconds. However, the metric was measured on a different scale where applicable (e.g. Mean Opinion Score was the measure used for the scenario on voice chat quality in order to gauge audio quality). As in the two tests above for Reliability and Speed, Xbox Live produced higher scores in Overall Quality than PlayStation Network in three out of four metrics.”
Although, it was an independent report, Microsoft didn’t lose this opportunity to take home the bragging rights over its competitor.