There's no denying this forthcoming generation has reached slinging match levels of 90s SEGA vs Nintendo in the playground proportions, and it's beginning to polarise consumers tired of unfounded attacks, or unbelievable retorts.

The age-old argument of hardware power versus software quality is currently front and centre, with Xbox One planning head Albert Penello responding to a recent Digital Foundry side-by-side comparison of the PS4 and Xbox One hardware, telling OXM that such comparisons are "meaningless".

"The problem is that Sony decided to go out and publish a bunch of numbers, which are in some ways meaningless," Penello said. "As a matter of fact they actually go out and they talk about how proud they are about their off-the-shelf parts. Our guys'll say, we touched every single component in the box and everything there is tweaked for optimum performance.

"For me, I'd rather not even have the conversation, because it's not going to matter," he continues. "The box is going to be awesome. The games are going to be awesome. I heard this exact same argument last generation and it's a pointless argument, because people are debating things which they don't know about. They're not [head silicon engineer] Nick Baker or [corporate vice president of IEB hardware Todd Holmdahl], and I'm not [lead PS4 architect] Mark Cerny, so why are we having this discussion?"

There are arguments for and against in most aspects of this new console war, and Sony's PS3 was arguably more powerful than the Xbox 360 yet both machines found visual parity after most devs worked out each machine's kinks (Naughty Dog efforts aside), and software is a major factor, but scrutiny will reign supreme early on in the life of this next generation. What are your thoughts on the PS4's new developer-friendly hardware specs, and the console war, thus far, in general?