On paper, the Xbox Series It’s a conundrum that has baffled many over the past few years and after discussions with several sources, including some of the industry’s most high-profile triple-A developers, we finally have some answers – and it’s all laid out in the This week’s edition of DF. Weekly live.
In terms of technical specifications, the Xbox Series X is arguably the most powerful console on the market – at least until the PlayStation 5 Pro arrives. Its GPU clocks in at 12 teraflops, boosted by a nice chunk of memory bandwidth: a maximum of 560GB/s. PlayStation 5? 10.23TF of GPU compute is available, powered by 448GB/s of bandwidth. So it’s a clear division. If we were to see this spec comparison in the PC space, you’d expect to see the former vastly outperform the latter.
Except that this generation has not experienced this kind of situation. Overall, this is the closest console generation we’ve ever seen and in most cross-platform releases the differences are pretty minimal. One machine can outperform the other, or vice versa. Sometimes when there are differences, they come down to variations in dynamic resolution scaling – which often seem invisible in A to B comparisons. It’s a far cry from the Xbox One Pro, where Microsoft’s machine had a clear advantage – or the PS4 vs Xbox One comparison, where Sony generally held an equally notable lead.
- 0:00:00 Presentation
- 0:02:00 News 01: First preview of FSR 3.1!
- 0:10:56 News 02: Dead Rising remake in development
- 0:22:55 News 03: Dragon’s Dogma 2 corrected
- 0:30:12 News 04: Keystone project details revealed
- 0:38:16 News 05: Forza Horizon 4 will be canceled
- 0:49:38 News 06: SGSSAA appears in a new game
- 0:58:46 News 07: Unity 50 Hz physics problem returns
- 1:07:55 Supporter Q1: Why isn’t there more criticism about Elden Ring’s issues? And is it really fair to criticize From Software so much on the technical side?
- 1:27:03 Supporter Q2: What should our expectations be for a potential PS3 emulator on PS5?
- 1:36:05 Supporter Q3: Why is the Series X still sometimes outperformed by the PS5 in cross-platform games?
- 1:45:54 Supporter Q4: Could something like Auto SR be implemented on consoles for backward compatible games?
- 1:50:00 Supporter Q5: Why are low settings in games much better than before?
So, after a few years of discussions with developers, what is the explanation? How can a less efficient machine outperform a more powerful machine? As we saw recently in our coverage of Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, the frame rate difference in favor of the PS5 is surprising, considering that it is apparently the less capable machine.
We’ve heard some interesting theories over the years, like that the Xbox Series X’s shared memory configuration (560GB/s of bandwidth on “fast” memory, 336GB/s on “slow” memory) could be impacting performance, but the main reason we’ve heard from developers has to do with the nature of Sony’s development environment. More than one key triple-A developer tells us that the PlayStation GPU compiler is significantly more efficient than Microsoft’s alternative, meaning there’s better utilization of the graphics hardware. In general, we understand that the lower-level API access granted to PlayStation development means game makers are getting more out of the hardware.
The second most common explanation we received from developers concerns the nature of the GPU itself. Mark Cerny himself spoke about this in March 2020 when he revealed the technical specifications of the PlayStation 5. Although the console may have fewer compute units than the Xbox Series GPU runs faster, which means some tasks will get done. faster, better suited to certain game engine designs. The extent of this advantage has always been unknown, as the PS5 runs with a boosted clock on both the CPU and GPU – maximum clock speeds will be limited by a power limit on the processor.
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However, we’ve yet to hear any complaints from developers about the boosted clock having an excessive impact on GPU performance. And in terms of raw numbers, there’s an interesting snippet from the recently leaked PlayStation 5 Pro developer documentation: enabling the CPU Boost option, which increases the clock speed by ten percent, only sees GPU performance drop by one percent – which is effectively negligible.
So, based on our conversations, the combination of a more efficient GPU compiler, lower level APIs, and higher clock speeds allows the PlayStation 5 to match, or even exceed, the outputs of the Xbox Series X in certain scenarios. That said, there is of course value in the approach Microsoft is taking: by standardizing DirectX 12 and the DXR ray tracing API, there is a commonality with PC development that obviously helps game creators. And of course, Xbox still has higher computational throughput – so game engines that exploit this will see benefits. Additionally, there are situations where the Xbox ecosystem and feature set pays dividends. For example, while Elden Ring may run faster on PlayStation 5, Sony’s limited implementation of variable refresh rate support means we’d much rather play the game on Xbox Series a smoother, more consistent experience.
At this point, having heard the same set of points from a range of completely unrelated developers means that the case is effectively closed on this particular topic – and we expect to see a similar situation play out across the rest of the generation. PlayStation 5 Pro? This is going to be interesting. We expect it to build on the same strengths that made PS5 competitive and go beyond – PSSR machine learning-based scaling should act as a sort of effective “multiplier” on its increased GPU performance.
This discussion is just a small part of DF Direct Weekly #169, where we have first impressions of the new Dragon’s Dogma 2 patch and AMD’s FSR 3.1 spatial scaling overhaul (expect more in-depth coverage on both soon), as well as comments on the new Dead Rising Remake. I hope you enjoy the series – and remember that backers of the DF Support Program not only get early access to each episode, but can also contribute to the series. Have a great week!