Analysing the specs of Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5

The cats are finally out of the bags. Both Microsoft and Sony have confirmed final specifications of Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 respectively over the last couple of weeks.

There aren't too many surprises. For anyone following the space, everything has lined up pretty much as expected. Let's start with the biggest shift this generation, and also, the biggest difference between the two consoles.
SSD

Burdened by painfully slow mechanical hard drives, game design has thus far been severely limited. There is one PC-only game, Star Citizen, that shows a glimpse of a SSD-only future, where tons more data can be streamed in with great complexity. Of course, load times will be much reduced too, but the main advancement would be far richer, more complex worlds.

This is where the PS5 takes a significant advantage, going with a 5.5 GB/s PCIe 4 SSD, whereas XSX settles for something more conservative with a 2.5 GB/s SSD. The XSX does seem to have better/easier expandability however. It also features 1 TB vs 825 GB for the PS5. I do feel 825 GB is going to be far too little for next-gen, without clear expandability. On the other hand, there'll be new compression tech used with dedicated silicon, which may mitigate that somewhat.

But, there's more to the SSD...
RAM

Both the PS5 and XSX feature 16 GB GDDR6 RAM, but in different configurations. XSX has a split RAM system with 10 GB accessible at 560 GB/s, with the remaining 6 GB at 336 GB/s. This ensures that complex, graphically demanding data gets access to the higher bandwidth, while more general, CPU-oriented tasks settle for a lower memory bandwidth. Meanwhile, PS5 also features 16 GB, but at a constant but lower 448 GB/s. Xbox employs a pretty clever solution here, and shouldn't cost any more than PS5's constant bandwidth. However, it may or may not be slightly more work for the game developers to leverage the split bandwidth system.

At first glance, 16 GB is quite unimpressive, given we had 8 GB way back in 2013, and 12 GB with Xbox One X in 2017. With previous generation consoles, the mechanical hard drive was so slow that the consoles had to hold at least 30 seconds worth of assets on the RAM. Now, with super-fast SSDs combined with compression, far more data can swap in and out of the RAM. Hence, only about a second's worth needs to be on RAM. So, while 8 GB to 16 GB sounds disappointing, the additional of a fast SSD and dedicated controllers means next-gen consoles will be able to stream an order of magnitude more data, once again leading to more complex, detailed worlds.
CPU

In addition to slow mechanical hard drives, the previous gen consoles featured anemic Jaguar cores which were initially designed for mobile. Unfortunately, AMD didn't have a better option at the time, so both Sony and Microsoft had to make do with these very slow CPU cores through the generation.

Both PS5 and XSX feature Zen 2 cores, which brings an incredible uplift over the Jags. It's going to be least 4 times faster, but consider the many bottlenecks eliminated, the ultimate effect will once again be a multiplier.

The end result will be far more complexity, richer simulations, larger worlds, but also new possibilities in gameplay mechanics that have thus far not been explored.

Both consoles feature roughly similar performance, so there's nothing to choose between them.
GPU

Last, but not the least, we come to the GPU. At its core, both feature AMD RDNA 2 cores, with plenty of next-gen feature enabled like hardware ray-tracing enabled, mesh shading, variable rate shading etc. However, the composition of the two consoles are quite a bit different.

Microsoft goes for a slow and wide approach, packing in 52 CUs at 1.875 GHZ. This leads to a 12 TFLOPS compute. Now, that is only 2x that of Xbox One X, and may not seem as impressive. However, once again, there's more to it than raw numbers. The RDNA 2 architecture is much more efficient, so the XSX should easily be 3 times as fast. But it goes beyond that - many of these new features add many new capabilities, so as always, there's a multiplier effect that'll lead to a much better experience.

Sony, meanwhile, has opted for only 36 Cus, which is significantly down on the XSX. However, they are clocking it much higher at a blistering 2.2+ GHz. Oddly, while Microsoft has a fixed clock, Sony is going for a boost clock. That means not all consoles and all games will hit the same clocks, but it should be close enough. Still, even at a much higher clock, the PS5 will only be able to peak at 10.3 TFLOPs, which means it's significantly down on XSX.

However, this is a much smaller gap than we saw last generation in the Xbox One vs PS4 and Xbox One X vs PS4 Pro battles.

The end result is likely going to be that the Xbox Series X runs games at a slightly higher resolution. Let's say XSX is able to hit a native 3840x2160 while the PS5 will do about 3520x1980 or so. In the heat of things, this shouldn't really be a noticeable difference.
Concluding

Both the PS5 and Xbox Series X look like incredibly powerful machines, offering performance equivalent to today's high-end PCs, while adding further features and capabiliities we have not seen yet. Both machines are fairly similar overall, with slight differences. The XSX has a faster GPU, while the PS5 has a faster SSD being the main ones.

I don't expect these to make too much of a difference, unlike last generation. At the end of the day, the winner is going to be decided by marketing, services, and of course, the slate of exclusive titles.

What about the PC then? This will of course benefit PC gamers too, as the massive SSD and CPU upgrades will lead to more complex games, and perhaps even totally new types of games. For a long time, PC gamers have focused on GPU - the CPU and storage have never been a bottleneck. With the next-gen, however, we'll go back to a decade or so ago where both the CPU and GPU are equally important for gaming performance.

Can't wait for the next-gen, and particularly the next-gen games!

(Crossposted from Hive Gaming)