What is gaming console & platform? A game console is a device which outputs video signal into TV screen to display the video game. A platform is in which console or system the game is being played such as PC, Xbox 360, PS3, etc.

Xbox One Xbox One is a video game console developed & released by Microsoft on November 22, It’s an eighth generation console which comes with better and advanced hardware and 1080p kinect camera, it also features Xbox live which allows a person to play online with friends. The featured specifications are: 1.75GHz 8 core AMD custom CPU 8GB DDR3 2133MHz RAM 800MHz AMD Radeon GPU 1080p display resolution Blu-Ray Optical Drive 500GB Hard Drive Kinect 2 motion control USB 3.0 HDMI input and output 7.1 surround sound At the end of December 31, 2013 over 3 million units sold so far.

PlayStation 4 PlayStation 4 which also known as PS4 is a gaming console developed by Song Computer Entertainment and released on 29 November, Its an eighth generation console aswell and it competes with Nintendo Wii U and Xbox One. The featured specifications are: AMD 8 core custom CPU AMD Radeon GPU 8GB GDDR5 RAM 500GB Hard Drive USB 3.0 Ethernet & Wi-Fi connectivity Bluetooth 2.1 It has two cameras and lenses operating with an aperture, one can be used for generating the video image and the other one can be used for motion tracking. PS4 runs an operating system called Orbis OS and it includes PlayStation Network which allows users to play online with friends and its similar to Xbox live.

Nintendo Wii The Wii is a gaming console developed and released by Nintendo on November 19, The featured specs are: 729MHz IBM Broadway CPU 243MHz ATI Hollywood GPU 88mb RAM 512MB internet flash memory Wi-Fi connectivity It’s a seventh generation console which competes with Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It has a game download service called Virtual Console which emulates games from Nintendo’s old consoles.

Microsoft Windows Windows is an Operating System which is most popular OS in world. Windows released different versions of its OS. The first version called Windows 1.0 released on November 20, It only being used on Computers and Windows mobile phone so far. It has approximately 90% market share and eventually overtook Mac Operating System. The versions can be upgraded to a newer version or update security by using their inbuilt feature in OS call Windows Update. Most of the PC games are made for windows OS and that’s what makes this OS so popular for gaming if its comes to PC gaming.

Games for Windows Games for Windows is a brand owned by Microsoft and introduced in November 8, The brand provides online service for Windows games and they have their own client that users can install and go to marketplace or download. Players had access features like voice chat, messaging and friend list. They used to have a technology call Tray and Play which allows users to put a game disc into an optical drive and start playing instantly while the game installs itself in the background and streams off the disc with minimal caching, the only game that used this technology was halo 2 and then Microsoft no longer uses this feature anymore. On august 25, 2013 the Games for Windows Marketplace has been shut down as a discontinuation of the brand.

Steam Steam is a digital distribution, multiplayer and communication platform developed and released by valve Corporation on September 12, It is used to distribute games online by allowing users to install steam client and buy games. The games can be played through steam simply by opening the client, they also feature auto update which updates games when theres a new version or patch. In October 2012, steam expended by allowing users to buy software as well. In the early 2013, valve created steam version for OS X and Linux.

So what exactly is online gaming? An online gaming is when a video game played over network using TCP/IP protocol. It allows user to play in a server with other players in world. Players can use clients such as steam for online communication with their friends including friendlist and groups etc. The advantage of online gaming is it allows players to meet other players in different countries and communicate and playing with real players instead of computer bots is much more fun.

Graphics comparison for different consoles