Ever since Sony and Microsoft revealed the system specifications for PS5 and Xbox Series X, their next-generation consoles due to launch this Holiday season, and the console war reignited in an instant.
To be frank, on the outset at least, the winner in this particular area seemed pretty clear. Xbox Series X has roughly 2 TFLOPs more than the PS5, thanks to the 52 Compute Units against PlayStation 5’s 36. Sure, the specs also listed a much faster I/O throughput for the PS5 (9 GB/s vs 4.8), but conventional wisdom dictated that compute power would matter more.
However, since then we’ve heard different takes on this. The most recent and chief example was, of course, Epic’s groundbreaking Unreal Engine 5 tech demo that was running on the PlayStation 5 for the very reason that the platform’s SSD and I/O design is far ahead than anything else, even PC, according to Tim Sweeney.
Previously, Ready at Dawn CTO Andrea Pessino had said he expects PS5 to be soon considered one of the most revolutionary consoles in history for its architecture.
Now, respected VentureBeat game journalist Jeff Grubb has shared on Twitter that some long-time third-party developers are ‘fawning’ over the PS5 architecture. He also added that he hasn’t heard the same level of praise for Microsoft’s Xbox Series X, though he didn’t hear anything bad either.
This is true. Lots of fawning over the work Cerny did. I think part of this is that PS5 dev kits got out earlier, and Cerny did a lot of work highlighting the efforts. But still, devs seem gaga for it. https://t.co/2xFp5vHpJy
— Jeff Grubb (@JeffGrubb) May 31, 2020
It’s from some people who have been third party for 25 years.
— Jeff Grubb (@JeffGrubb) May 31, 2020
For sure, but devs mean this in a relative way. They are saying, all things being equal, this is “the best architected console” they’ve ever seen. Does that make sense? Like, beyond the normal advancements you would expect. https://t.co/mhe4ddYl73
— Jeff Grubb (@JeffGrubb) May 31, 2020
This isn’t the first time we heard something like this from a colleague in the press. Jason Schreier, previously of Kotaku fame and now at Bloomberg, pointed out the very same thing shortly after the next-gen system spec reveals.
Sony has dropped the ball and there’s going to be like weeks and weeks, if not months and months, especially with Corona disrupting everything, of people just talking about how the Xbox Series X is the most powerful console and it’s beating the PS5 in every single way. Meanwhile, I’m getting texts and DMs, even today as this was going on, from developers being like ‘This is such a shame, the PS5 is so superior in all these other ways that they’re not actually able to message right now or can’t talk about right now’. I heard from at least three different people in the past couple of hours since the Cerny talk being like ‘The PS5 is actually like the more superior piece of hardware in a lot of different ways despite what you’re seeing in these paper spec sheets’.
We should soon get a taste of what the PlayStation 5 can really do, given that the showcase event has been confirmed for Thursday, June 4th at 1 PM Pacific Time.
