Until we get both of the next-gen consoles in our hands, the arguments over which machine would win in the battle of PS5 vs Xbox Series X will rage on. But if you're pinning your hopes on the PS5 rather than the Xbox Series X, you might be backing the right horse.
That's according to Crytek rendering engineer Ali Salehi, speaking to Persian gaming website Vigiato (with a translation courtesy of Twitter user @man4dead).
- Xbox Series X: everything we know so far
- PS5: all the specs, news and rumours
- Five things you need to know about the PS5
On paper, the Xbox Series X looks like the more capable console in terms of raw power, with a GPU capable of hitting 12 teraflops compared to the PS5's max of 10.28 teraflops.
But that only seems to be part of the story. According to Salehi, the Xbox Series X is a more complicated console to work with, meaning hitting that 12 teraflop theoretical peak can be difficult, while reaching the full potential of the PS5 is easy.
A good example of this situation has happened before. With PS3. PS3 had much higher flops than 360 because of its SPU. But in practice because of its complications and memory bottleneck and other problems it never reached its peak of performance on paper.April 6, 2020
Having two different bandwidths for RAM in the Xbox Series X is also causing grief:
Because the the total amount of things we want to put in the fast part is so much that it may cause problems. And if we want to support 4k it will be another whole story.So there will be somethings that will hold the gpu off.April 6, 2020
Lots of Salehi's commentary echoes what Mark Cerny, PlayStation's lead architect for hardware development has claimed about the ease of developing for the PS5 console.
But the proof will be in the gaming experiences created, not to mention the price, which has yet to be revealed for either console. Another factor working in the PS5's favour is multi-platform releases – the lowest common denominator (in this case the PS5's peak theoretical power) will dictate the limits of any game expected to be released across both machines. So don't let those spec sheets sway your choices just yet.
- PS5 games: what we're looking forward to the most
- PS5 price and pre-orders: everything we know so far
