I hate these wars but we have to talk about them seeing as they are part of gaming culture. It reminds me of the playground arguments that kids would have about which computer was technically superior. If history has taught us anything about these wars, being technically superior doesn't win wars. The 3DO was technically the most superior console at the time but other factors such as the price of the fucking thing which made it unaffordable to most people meant that it bombed. The Nintendo Wii which was the weakest console technically of that generation won that war selling over 100 million, it outstripped both the PS3 and Xbox 360. It was essentially a jumped up Gamecube which was a previous generation console that again was technically better than the PS2 and Xbox but it didn't sell as well. Anyway, the point being is that technicals don't win wars, other factors like price and more importantly games win these wars. So now we've seen the technical specifications of both the Series X and the PS5. On paper, Microsoft appears to have the upper hand and the most technically superior console. Both use a custom AMD Zen 2 technology and RDNA 2 architecture which was known about a while ago. The Xbox Series X GPU boasts 12 teraflops of computing performance, with 3328 shaders allocated to 52 compute units. The GPU for the PS5 boasts 10.28 teraflops offering 36 compute units.
However, both consoles should be more than capable of running 60FPS at 4K resolution and should be capable of 30FPS at 8K. (Even though most of us are still rocking HD TV's let alone 4K or an 8K.) Plus, both consoles should be able to support ray tracing, a technique that has been the reserve of PC gamers with expensive high-end PC GPUs. The leap in graphics between this new generation and the last isn't going to be as significant as previous generations. The cost and development budgets for making games for these consoles are expensive as it is. Ray tracing will make the difference but even with these figures, it's only going to take the likes of Digital Foundry to analyse and notice the differences between the two consoles, the average gamer probably won't be able to tell them apart.
Both boast 16GB of DDR6 ram and both have SSD's with Microsoft offering a 1TB NVMe SSD which is expandable with its propriety drives made by Seagate, with the PS5, they are offering an 825GB SSD which is expandable with off the shelf SSD's that Sony will recommend. The Xbox Series X's NVMe SSD drives are fast but the PS5's 825 GB internal SSD is quite a different beast altogether. It connects to a custom flash controller via a 12-channel interface delivering 5.5 GBs of raw throughput and 9GBs compressed, which means the PS5's SSD is so fast that the console's 16 GB of memory can be filled in just two seconds (2 GB in 0.25 seconds). This does something which neither Xbox does or any PC can do and it could be a game-changer. This means loading times could be a thing of the past and loading up geometry and textures for large open worlds can be loaded on the fly. While the Xbox is essentially a high spec PC, the PS5 has done something truly different. Despite all of this, the games which have been announced for both consoles are limited. Halo Infinite and Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2, and the PS5 will get Godfall although they are not exclusives as they will be available for the PC. So until some games or exclusives are announced, there isn't that much to get excited about. We don't know the price of the consoles yet and we still don't know what the PS5 will look like despite it being released later on this year. The new Xbox will be backwards compatible with the previous generation while the PS5 will be backwards compatible with the top 100 PS4 games, although this may change in the near future.
No doubt as we get closer towards the release dates, further announcements will happen and that might give us a better picture of how this war will play out.
Comments