Overnight PlayStation held on online briefing that revealed the hardware specs of the upcoming PS5. With Xbox also unveiling their Series X specs a few days ago, we now have the ability to compare both.
The hardware specs on both are dramatic improvements over our current generations consoles, pushing hard into the 4K gameplay era.
The Xbox Series X will have a GPU that offers 12 Teraflops of performance, while the PS5 will have just 10.28 TFLOPs. So that’s it right, game over? Not exactly.
PlayStation are placing a big bet on their faster SSD, which while smaller in size, offers almost instant game loads. The Xbox Series X will also move from spinning disk to an SSD, however the read/writes are down slightly on what the PS5 offers.
This battle plays out down the spec list between the CPU, RAM, Memory bandwidth, but there’s something potentially even more important and that’s the network speeds.
Many of us barely used the optical drives in our Xbox Ones, opting for a slice of living in the future, with digital delivery. In many ways, the time between deciding to try a new game and when you can play it, is more important than the individual game load time.
As we look to the future, over the life of the next generation consoles, Microsoft and Sony will go head-to-head on streaming services (PS5 NOW vs Project xCloud), negating any hard drive load time discrepancies.
In terms of which game streaming service will be better, that’s really hard to say right now, but history tells us, Microsoft has better infrastructure. Ultimately this is a battle for developer attention and having a better lineup of games could really drive the decision for gamers.
Its no secret the PS4 outsold the Xbox One / One X, so lets call that a win for Sony. It seems Microsoft learnt from their marketing miss-steps from the last generation and are completely focusing on the games, rather than the entertainment options the console provides.
This generation of consoles will be the most like a PC in the living room that we’ve ever seen.
If you haven’t seen it, check out the Road to PS5 video below, that features PS5 lead system architect Mark Cerny who takes a deep dive into PS5’s system architecture.
