Xbox One vs. PS4

Typically, E3 is all about new game announcements. Though we still had a few of those this year, 2013 was more about hardware: the Xbox One and PS4. Both push the technical boundaries of gaming consoles, offer their own mixes of strengths and weaknesses, and release at around the same time. So how do you choose? Allow Gizmag to lend a hand, as we compare the specs (and other features) of the Microsoft Xbox One and SonyPlayStation 4.

Both consoles sport 500 GB internal hard drives. In terms of future-proofing, though, the PS4 might be the better choice. Like the PS3, it will let you upgrade the hard drive. The Xbox won't.

There is one option for expanding your Xbox One storage though. It lets you attach an external hard drive via USB. You can do everything with that drive that you can with the internal one.

We don't yet know whether the PS4 lets you use USB drives for storage, but we do know that it has two USB 3.0 ports.

Both systems have 8 GB of RAM. The PS4's GDDR5 memory, however, is faster than the Xbox's DDR3 RAM. Will this be something that you actually notice in day-to-day use? It's still too early to say.

AMD cashed in on this generation of gaming consoles, as it provides the octa-core processors for both the Xbox One and PS4.

Both consoles also feature AMD Radeon GPUs, which are integrated into their respective Accelerated Processing Units (APUs).

This is obviously a simple visual that doesn't begin to tell the full story, but that's only because we don't yet know the full story. Developers will need time to tinker around with both consoles, and we might not even have a definitive "graphics winner" a year after both consoles have been on the market.

One thing worth keeping an eye on is how easy or hard it is to develop for each console. Last generation, the PS3 was, on a specs level, graphically superior to the Xbox 360. But the Xbox 360 was easier to develop for and port to. Thus side-by-side comparisons of cross-platform games often favored the Xbox.

You'll want to take this with many grains of salt, but there have been early whispers that the PS4 is a joy to develop for. It might not sound like much now, but software can make or break hardware. This could be an encouraging sign for the PS4.

Having said that, we spent some time with both unreleased consoles during E3. The early games we saw on both systems look terrific, with graphics that are roughly in line with recent PC games.

Unless you're cramped for space under your TV, this probably won't be a deal-breaker one way or the other. But, for what it's worth, the Xbox One is the bigger console. In terms of surface area, it's 21 percent larger than the new PlayStation. And that isn't counting the new Kinect, which ships with every new Xbox One.

Note that the Xbox One's listed dimensions aren't official, but are based on some clever calculations (based on the USB port) by PSMania.

Last time around, the PS3 had a big leg up on the Xbox 360, in that it played Blu-ray discs. No worries with either next-gen console, as (unsurprisingly) both will play your Blu-rays and DVDs.