PlayStation 5 vs Xbox Series X: What We Know So Far

[true_kiat]

However BC remains a strength for Xbox Series X as, once again, the console will support any Xbox game from any console generation.

Not really.

 

[rhalgr]

Not really.

True. It's every Xbox One game via hardware bc. Additionally the Xbox 360 & Xbox games playable on Xbox One. Obviously there could be more games, but it's not all of them due to license issues and so on.

Edit:

 

[kjeldsen]

There is not a lot to be optimized by RAM. Out of the 6GB slower RAM 2,5GB are for the OS. Smart developer aka every developer will use the rest 3,5GB for CPU, audio, ... tasks and sometimes for GPU tasks that don't need much bandwith.

Both the CPU & GPU got access to both RAM. It's not a typical split RAM design iirc.

CU: Depending on the task, it will provide a bigger difference and not a lower one. RT for example greatly benefits from more CU.

I am more hyped for next gen than last gen, because of Ray Tracing, insane CPU jump and the SSD's. Games will look great & hopefully play better

"the lesser optimized games will not take advantage of the optimal memory, holding back the XBX even more"

Plenty of examples of this in the current generation, and it is always with 3rd party games.

 

[rhalgr]

"the lesser optimized games will not take advantage of the optimal memory, holding back the XBX even more"

Plenty of examples of this in the current generation, and it is always with 3rd party games.

For example?

 

[kjeldsen]

For example?

Are you serious? You want me to show you examples of bad 3rd party ports that doesn't take advantage of hardware features and therefore is crippled? Really, i can't take you serious then.

 

[ImaRobot]

Are you serious? You want me to show you examples of bad 3rd party ports that doesn't take advantage of hardware features and therefore is crippled? Really, i can't take you serious then.

Do you do this every time someone asks you to back up what you’re saying?

 

[Robin]

However BC remains a strength for Xbox Series X as, once again, the console will support just about any Xbox game from any console generation.

This is certainly up there as one of the bigger points that I will be looking at when it comes to this generation. It's beggars belief that MS has got full disk based BC working (more or less at an acceptable level) for years now, PowerPC and all, and Sony might not even be able to get all PS4 games working on PS5. There aren't any excuses anymore for PS1,2,3 BC. In the PS4 era maybe I could sympathise because the switch to x86 was new etc but not now. If it's so hard stick the PS3 chipset in it (which is like a few bucks now) and emulate the rest.

 

[rhalgr]

Are you serious? You want me to show you examples of bad 3rd party ports that doesn't take advantage of hardware features and therefore is crippled? Really, i can't take you serious then.

Not taking full advantage of hardware features is an entirely different issue than not choosing the correct RAM. This is easy to do for developers and they face much harder issues during development.

 

[kjeldsen]

Do you do this every time someone asks you to back up what you’re saying?

When the answer is so obvious and the examples so many i do. Because either i am discussing with an ignorant fool, or with someone that has an agenda, and this dude knows enough about consoles to make me think there is an agenda. And i stopped having those discussions on the interweb many years ago, i add those people to my ignore list, and carry on.

The eSRAM was a cornerstone in the XBOX One series design, 3rd party titles rarely used it, and it was completely removed from the XBOX ONE X, leading even less developers to support it. And here you can find hundreds of comparisons that very often show how the different consoles strengths isn't used by 3rd parties. https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry/xboxone because it takes time. Just like a 2 tier memory setup will do on the XBSX

3rd party developers will have to do work on their XBSX ports to make sure everything runs nicely, not a lot of work, but enough that i am certain we will see ports that doesn't make sense performance wise.

 

[rhalgr]

When the answer is so obvious and the examples so many i do. Because either i am discussing with an ignorant fool, or with someone that has an agenda,

I would call myself a developer and not ignorant fool

The eSRAM was a cornerstone in the XBOX One series design, 3rd party titles rarely used it, and it was completely removed from the XBOX ONE X,

The esram was removed, because 12GB GDDR5 was the superior solutions and not because devs didn't use esram. Especially for the goal to deliver an console targeting 4K.

I fail to understand what DF comparison of ports have to do with the question, if developers have an hard time choosing different RAM for different tasks.

You are right, there are some poor ports, but like in every job some tasks are easy to do and others aren't. Choosing the correct RAM is like choosing the right tool to change tires... Easy.

 

[ImaRobot]

When the answer is so obvious and the examples so many i do. Because either i am discussing with an ignorant fool, or with someone that has an agenda, and this dude knows enough about consoles to make me think there is an agenda. And i stopped having those discussions on the interweb many years ago, i add those people to my ignore list, and carry on.

You say it's so obvious, so I'm confused to why you won't just produce what was asked for. Seems like it would be extremely easy to post what was asked if that's what you're going to say. If you're not willing to further a discussion you got yourself into, than I don't know what to tell you.

 

[Rickrmtskingdom]

In principle, a 6.8-inch penis is very much above average, but next to an 8-inch one...

Yes, hence:

The gag there being that the PS5 can stream literally an entire world into view in the time it takes you to turn and look at it, while the Xbox probably can't. It's not much of a joke, but I enjoyed writing it.

If that's what you're getting from the article, I'd like to suggest you go back and read it again. There is no parity between the consoles in any department except the technology underpinning the CPU (in different specifications) and GPU (in wildly different specifications), and the amount and type of RAM (but not the bit rate).

Yes, though I went with hyperthreading with the lower case "h" simply because it seems to be the most readily recognised term for the technology.

The piece is intended to be no more techy than absolutely necessary - for a highly techy subject - for ease of consumption. There will be objections to some of the terminology (I'm not an expert) and some people will still somehow read it and decide that I'm biased towards the Xbox (I have an original Xbox; it's in the loft and has been for eight years) or PS5 (that's far more likely; I'm not, though it is the most likely of the two I'll get, because I am the GT nerd) because of how many times I said one before the other, or the way round they are in the title/lead image/chart.

We’ve heard the same at every launch just to find out its the same all crap! “Divide and conquer”buddy, Both of them use Blue ray, I wonder why? Ray tracing? Etc... etc... no real advantage for anyone, and remember the gaming across platforms is coming so everything will be basically the same crap!!

 

[Jump_Ace]

Great article @Famine Good work on making technical aspects easy to understand. That isn't always easy.

If GT was on Xbox I'd be sure to buy that. But it won't be, so I'll start with a PS5. I may end up getting both if the next-gen cross play isn't sufficient.


Jerome

 

[Famine]

We’ve heard the same at every launch just to find out its the same all crap!

You must have a short memory then, because there wasn't an Xbox to be the same as the PS1, the first Xbox had double the CPU clock speed (733MHz custom Pentium 3 vs. 299MHz 'Emotion Engine') and RAM as the PS2, close on double the GPU clock speed, and came with a hard drive, and the 360 had a 3.2GHz custom Power PC Xenon against the PS3's famous Cell BE, and a unified 512MB GDDR3 memory pool (PS3 was split, half on video, half on system RAM), a 500MHz AMD GPU against the 550MHz Nvidia in the PS3.

Only the original PS4 and XBOne were broadly similar - 8-core Jaguar CPU (1.6 vs 1.75 GHz), AMD Radeon GPU at (800MHz vs 853MHz), 8GB RAM (DDR3 in the XB1, DDR5 in the PS4) - and still the details separated them.

If you're getting the impression that the PS5 and XSX are "the same crap" then you really need to read it all again. I hope you're not just reading the chart and deciding that because they both use AMD Ryzen Zen2 architecture in the CPU, AMD RDNA2 architecture in the GPU, and have 16GB of DDR6 and a solid state drive, then they must be the same.


There will always be some similarity between real-world performance of two differing consoles in the same generation, because the people who make games want to make games for both - and the people who make the consoles want to sell the licences to do so to as many people as possible. That means that the feature set will always have some similarity too, because if one has something the other doesn't, a game developer who wants to use that feature can't use it if selling on both platforms - or run with a notably worse version on one.

 

[GT6mebe]

Have you seen Halo 5 HDR via Microsoft ML solutions yet? I doubt it, because only a few got a first look. Digital Foundry is impressed by the results and said it's different to fake HDR. Fusion Frenzy with HDR was also impressive according to DF.

The very article talks about luminosity maps, but HDR is luminosity and color changes. There is no talk on the color changes and ML HDR reconstruction is still not exactly like actual HDR.

So you are saying this is wrong and proof me right in the second sentence, since the SSD isn't rendering anything?? xD

I'm saying if you care about rendering then SSD is crucial. There will be nothing to render if the SSD does not feed data to RAM, so the faster your feed is the more you can render.

Which is an advantage for Xbox, because OS and some tasks for games don't need much bandwith, while high bandwith is crucial for Ray Tracing and resolution.

This is not right. 10 GB high speed and rest low means most devs will use low speed for CPU/OS. Meanwhile PS5 has 16 GB of mid speed with very little being for the OS (due to the SSD PS5 can load the OS very quickly and so does not need to store all of it on RAM). So PS5 could have 15GB of mid speed vs 10GB of high speed for XSX. (Also due to PS5 have GPU cache scrubbers)

High ALU is what results in high Resolution and Ray tracing -> this is what your teraflop number means

Streaming speed has nothing to do with Teraflops.

Both are making sure audio & decompression doesn't task the CPU. -> dedicated hardware for these tasks

You're being too vague. Many devices use audio and decompression does not make them the same. The implementation matters.

PS5 uses Kraken, XSX uses BCPack.
PS5 uses Tempest which very different to anything out there at the moment.

Both are making sure there are no big bottlenecks

Not true. Only Sony has talked about custom I/O to remove streaming bottlenecks. XSX hasn't broken down any of that afaik.

Both use the same architecture for CPU & GPU

With completely different configurations which matter.

both got an audio engine for 3d audio, Audio RT, ... .

PS5 is using HRTFs which is far more advanced than what MS has announced.

I certainly think this comment isn't true when looking at the hardware...

Look, you really have to be a dev or computer hardware knower to see all the differences and we are neither. The simplest explanation is XSX is primarily upping ALU, which is a traditional move.

PS5 is focused on making all streaming speeds high, which is less traditional and it has unique chips to do that hence it being more unique.

Best to trust what devs say.

 

[GT6mebe]

True. It's every Xbox One game via hardware bc. Additionally the Xbox 360 & Xbox games playable on Xbox One. Obviously there could be more games, but it's not all of them due to license issues and so on.

Edit:

FYI this guy seems to be part fo the company involved in BCPack, the decompression XSX uses. Its also a moot point.

We already know BCPack is better than Kraken:
compressed -> decompressed
XSX : 2.4 GB/s -> 4.8 GB/s
PS4 5 GB/s -> 8-9 GB/s

Decompression does not change how much quicker the SSD is though.

 

[Rickrmtskingdom]

You must have a short memory then, because there wasn't an Xbox to be the same as the PS1, the first Xbox had double the CPU clock speed (733MHz custom Pentium 3 vs. 299MHz 'Emotion Engine') and RAM as the PS2, close on double the GPU clock speed, and came with a hard drive, and the 360 had a 3.2GHz custom Power PC Xenon against the PS3's famous Cell BE, and a unified 512MB GDDR3 memory pool (PS3 was split, half on video, half on system RAM), a 500MHz AMD GPU against the 550MHz Nvidia in the PS3.

Only the original PS4 and XBOne were broadly similar - 8-core Jaguar CPU (1.6 vs 1.75 GHz), AMD Radeon GPU at (800MHz vs 853MHz), 8GB RAM (DDR3 in the XB1, DDR5 in the PS4) - and still the details separated them.

If you're getting the impression that the PS5 and XSX are "the same crap" then you really need to read it all again. I hope you're not just reading the chart and deciding that because they both use AMD Ryzen Zen2 architecture in the CPU, AMD RDNA2 architecture in the GPU, and have 16GB of DDR6 and a solid state drive, then they must be the same.


There will always be some similarity between real-world performance of two differing consoles in the same generation, because the people who make games want to make games for both - and the people who make the consoles want to sell the licences to do so to as many people as possible. That means that the feature set will always have some similarity too, because if one has something the other doesn't, a game developer who wants to use that feature can't use it if selling on both platforms - or run with a notably worse version on one.

You get the win because you’re trying too hard

 

[rhalgr]

I'm saying if you care about rendering then SSD is crucial. There will be nothing to render if the SSD does not feed data to RAM, so the faster your feed is the more you can render.

In theory. The GPU needs to be able to do it. But this wasn't my point to begin with... I said there are some underrating and overrating SSD and gave examples. I fully understand there are benefits of an SSD, but some people claiming it does render something are wrong... Just like the people saying SSD only improve load times are wrong.

This is not right

It absolutely is right. More bandwidth is better for the GPU, especially when your GPU is stronger. PS5 solutions could provide issues with bandwidth intensive tasks (for example RT) and is not really efficient, because OS tasks for instance don't need that much bandwith.

We will see how much RAM Sony needs or saves for the OS. They could have an advantage there. But this remains to be seen for now. The SSD as you said can't solve everything in this regard and Sony has to save some amount of RAM for OS tasks.

So PS5 could have 15GB of mid speed vs 10GB of high speed for XSX.

You ignore that some tasks don't need high bandwidth. While some of them can't get enough bandwidth so to speak. Sony solution isn't optimal for either of these.

You're being too vague. Many devices use audio and decompression does not make them the same. The implementation matters

What i meant to say with this is that both have solutions to not task the CPU. If the solution are better at decompression or audio wasn't my point.

It would've been a bottleneck, if the consoles wouldn't use dedicated hardware and used the 8 zen cores for these tasks. Sony and MS gladly have smart people working there and choose not to "bottleneck" the CPU in this regard.

Not true. Only Sony has talked about custom I/O to remove streaming bottlenecks. XSX hasn't broken down any of that afaik.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-inside-xbox-series-x-full-specs


Edit:

High ALU is what results in high Resolution and Ray tracing -> this is what your teraflop number means

Streaming speed has nothing to do with Teraflops

right, but bandwith is important for Ray Tracing and resolution. You can't just look at the TF difference and calculate a difference for RT. If you don't take mine, then take his words:

https://www.resetera.com/threads/nx...a-new-generation-is-born.176121/post-30124594

Xbox will excel at ray tracing. Just like PS5 will have benefits for some tasks, which benefit from higher clockspeed.

Edit:

PS5 is using HRTFs which is far more advanced than what MS has announced.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/spatial-audio/

I am a developer, but not an expert for audio. Fact of the matter is HRTF is used by both. But Sony history with sound, incredible knowledge there and their acquisition probably bold well for their tempest engine and which company will have an advantage there.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/spatial-audio/

Note: This is one part of their audio endeavours for gaming & series x.

In my opinion its great to see both companies doing something with audio in games. Surely this increases the chance that third party developer will take advantage of these techniques, despite them not being the same.

 

[KingK76]

The Series X GPU is actually 12.155TF... If Sony is going to add the .3 then you might as well ad the .155 to the XBOX.

 

[rhalgr]

Interesting video in general and they even got an article with Cerny. For the thread this particular timestamp is interesting, because it goes to show what the difference in CU & frequency can mean, if both GPU have the same TF number.

Obviously this will depend on game by game basis and depending on the tasks. But we can see here an 2,5% advantage for an "wider" GPU in hitman.

- 5700 XT (40CU at 1890MHz)
- 5700 (36CU at 2100MHz)
Same TF Number

 

[CodeRedR51]

 

[nowcontrol]

 

[PzR Slim]

Nice to see them go more XBox/Switch controller shape.

The haptic is a bit of a game changer on the Switch Joy Cons so looking forward to how they implement haptic into the Dualsense. And really interested to see what they can do with the adaptive triggers.

https://blog.us.playstation.com/202...w-wireless-game-controller-for-playstation-5/

 

[andrea]

This is a color edit.

 

[FT-1]

If the BMW i division designed gaming peripherals, the DualSense is how I would imagine the controller to look.

I'm really liking the design; looks modern without discarding its Dualshock roots. 👍

 

[Casey]

The D-pad looks like a PSP D-pad.

Edit: Kinda glad the stayed with the same overall trigger design cause the main thing I don't really like about the One/Series X controller. Not sure how I feel about the grips being bigger but I'll wait until I try it.

 

[Robin]

I hope it also comes in Black at launch, White tends to go off colour after a while if it's something you hold in your hands regularly. Still, it's a cool looking controller, the non coloured crystal buttons look great, very PS Vita.

I wonder if it gives a clue to the design language of the console itself.

 

[Mr Grumpy]

I hope it also comes in Black at launch, White tends to go off colour after a while if it's something you hold in your hands regularly. Still, it's a cool looking controller, the non coloured crystal buttons look great, very PS Vita.

I wonder if it gives a clue to the design language of the console itself.

I'm going for a cylinder shape, black bottom half, white top half, with a blue led ring around the middle separating the two, with a retro ps1 top loader BluRay drive on top

 

[Robin]

I'm going for a cylinder shape, black bottom half, white top half, with a blue led ring around the middle separating the two, with a retro ps1 top loader BluRay drive on top

So something like this,

with this underneath,

only taller,

 

[redhed17]

Starting to morph closer to the XBox controller rather than the traditional PS controller shape that has evolved. Not saying that is good or bad btw.