PS5 PlayStation 5 - November 12

[Quivorir]

Will end up getting both and the xbox will most likely be a paperweight as usual, but speed wins over power for me. I can't ****ing stand loading screens.

 

[the big lebowski]

As a PlayStation player I think these specs are a little underwhelming. Microsoft seem to be doing everything right and have positioned themselves to be the place to play games at their optimum.

 

[atlas1]

From what I've been reading the difference in speed will be negligible, probably a few seconds here and there.

Apparently the PS5's 10.28 teraflop number refers to when it's overclocked (hence the variable frequency), and 9 teraflops is closer to the normal performance.

 

[dwwaino]

I’ve purely been a PlayStation guy since the original PlayStation I have owned Xbox consoles but the exclusives have never really grabbed my attention other than fable. I’m open to jumping on an Xbox but they’d need to wow me exclusives wise which I think really let’s them down. As for gamepass that and Xbox having more power at the start of next gen they will win back a lot of who they lost and it will move systems.

Sony is lucky that they have as many good first party games as they do because ps5 being so underpowered is a pretty big fu** up unless they’re doing a ps5 pro in a year

I'm similar. Been team PlayStation since the start when it comes to consoles, but as a mostly PC gamer that is now blessed with Game Pass I can't go past it at all. I'll still get a PS5 for my console stuff as that's the preferred platform of some friends and family.

 

[dwwaino]

From what I've been reading the difference in speed will be negligible, probably a few seconds here and there.

Apparently the PS5's 10.28 teraflop number refers to when it's overclocked (hence the variable frequency), and 9 teraflops is closer to the normal performance.

The variable clock should be for TDP and developers will be able to optimise the game better for the system. It will take more work for developers to push the higher clocks though and to keep thermals under control. The glaring difference I see is the 32 vs 52 compute units. The PS5 likely going to be a more optimised unit where the Xbox will be just brute power.

I'm really keen to see how the Xbox Lockhart fares. The Series X won't be cheap and the PS5 right now could be a winner at a cheaper price for almost as good. If Lockhart is optimised really well and decently undercuts the PS5 then Sony might be in a tough place.

 

[pantskyle]

Personally reckon Sony have goofed here, if I wasn't such a fanboy and a hater of the Xbox controller I'd seriously look at swapping.

 

[BOMBERS 4 LIFE!!!!]

Personally reckon Sony have goofed here, if I wasn't such a fanboy and a hater of the Xbox controller I'd seriously look at swapping.

I think Xbox will win this next generation imo

PS5 exclusive is what was beating Xbox that won't be the case anymore with once MS start releasing excluisves from the game studios they purchased.

 

[dwwaino]

And here it is

 

[Mantastic]

Feels underwhelming. The SSD advances sound good in theory and should be awesome for load times but I'm not sure if a lot of the other benefits aren't just matched by the Xbox's better RAM. And I'm worried about cooling and throttling, especially with the variable and high clockspeeds, and the fact they haven't revealed the design. If it thermal throttles and can't reach max clocks, it could be seriously underpowered.

 

[dwwaino]

Feels underwhelming. The SSD advances sound good in theory and should be awesome for load times but I'm not sure if a lot of the other benefits aren't just matched by the Xbox's better RAM. And I'm worried about cooling and throttling, especially with the variable and high clockspeeds, and the fact they haven't revealed the design. If it thermal throttles and can't reach max clocks, it could be seriously underpowered.

The custom IO on the GPU to read straight from storage is interesting, it pretty much cuts out the CPU and you're no longer bound by the IPC. I'd still love to see the design of the console though like as you said, because 2.2ghz on a GPU is nuts. That's typically a user overclock on a PC GPU. I guess if they not relying on the IPC of the CPU as much and feeding the GPU directly and they can get those speeds then that is some serious innovation. I'm a nuff so will probably have it entirely wrong, but I'm guessing it will probably have a default 1.8ghz clock or something and it will be up to the developer to utilise the rest. But that will be a test to keep the thermals down and prevent throttling.

 

[Purple Suit]

I think Xbox will win this next generation imo

PS5 exclusive is what was beating Xbox that won't be the case anymore with once MS start releasing excluisves from the game studios they purchased.

Depends how good they are. Playstation have 3 or 4 of the best studios making games atm so they would have to bomb massively to not produce more hits.

Right now, i am deciding on whether I need a second console with a series X or trying to just play the new ones on pc and hope they are good.

 

[BOMBERS 4 LIFE!!!!]

Depends how good they are. Playstation have 3 or 4 of the best studios making games atm so they would have to bomb massively to not produce more hits.

Right now, i am deciding on whether I need a second console with a series X or trying to just play the new ones on pc and hope they are good.

Was on board with switching to PS5 at launch but with Sony being underwhelming so far and MS coming out of the gates has swung me back to Xbox. Sony need to wow me in the next few months

 

[dwwaino]

It looks like Sony have attempted to innovate far more than what Microsoft have offered so far. Even the audio engine inside the PS5 according to what I saw on DF's video sounds interesting. Though to be honest all the majority are going to care about are the actual games. As mentioned Sony probably have the better studios (of course that's subjective), but Microsoft are going to have a much larger catalogue and of course Game Pass.

As it has always been my advice on what to choose goes like this: Get the console your friends play, or if you're a #foreveralone type just pick the one that you like the exclusives of more.

 

[BOMBERS 4 LIFE!!!!]

It looks like Sony have attempted to innovate far more than what Microsoft have offered so far. Even the audio engine inside the PS5 according to what I saw on DF's video sounds interesting. Though to be honest all the majority are going to care about are the actual games. As mentioned Sony probably have the better studios (of course that's subjective), but Microsoft are going to have a much larger catalogue and of course Game Pass.

As it has always been my advice on what to choose goes like this: Get the console your friends play, or if you're a #foreveralone type just pick the one that you like the exclusives of more.

Will eventually get both but i'm having a hard time deciding which one to get at launch.

Probably end up going with PS5 because of my brother is getting one.

 

[Del80659]

when did console gamers start talking like PC nerds

 

[pantskyle]

when did console gamers start talking like PC nerds

When we started getting PC specs in our consoles.

 

[Dez!]

Give me the speed and games of the PS5 over the power and nothing of Xbox.

 

[Struggle]

All i want from the ps5 is the removal of the need to have pretty much double the patch size in free storage to download it.

 

[Mantastic]

All i want from the ps5 is the removal of the need to have pretty much double the patch size in free storage to download it.

Yeah, surely they have to get rid of the copy/patch system. It's so tediously slow on PS4.

I only just heard today that the PS5 does not have full backwards compatibility and will only launch with select titles, albeit they're targeting the most played PS4 games. Sony has a bit of work to do. Hopefully it's a cheaper system, certainly feels like it should be.

 

[exe ex machina]

No, the PS5 won’t offer anywhere near the graphics performance of Xbox Series X: Navi benchmarks prove it

Sony’s claim that high clockspeeds offset its meagre shader allocation on the PlayStation 5 doesn’t hold water when Navi overclocking results are factored in. Due to non-linear performance/clock scaling, the likely performance deficit between the two consoles is in the 25-30 percent range, which...

www.notebookcheck.net

This leads to the sobering conclusion that in real-world workloads, the PS5 might be 30 percent or more slower than the Xbox Series X. We don’t expect the world’s fastest SSD or individual raindrop audio rendering to offset that.

 

[dwwaino]

I'll chuck this in both threads. Some interesting info regarding the hardware. Skip time to 9:21.

 

[pantskyle]

Last week the PS5 finally revealed some technical details, albeit in a rather dry way via a developers lecture as opposed to an official public launch. For those who sat through the hour-long video, there was some fascinating discussion as to how Sony has re-engineered and customised the hell out of the system architecture in order to squeeze every drop of power out of it that they can.




However, like whenever someone publishes a film review, it was TL;DR for many who didn’t care to read and jumped straight to the score – namely the specs and more specifically the ‘TFLOPS’ measurement. On that front, there wasn’t a debate – the Xbox Series X has a 17% advantage over the PlayStation 5 in terms of its potential maximum power (12.15TF to 10.29TF). On the other hand, the PS5 has a decided advantage in terms of loading speed.


In the wake of the reveal, fanboys and armchair experts galore have been trying to compare the two and making all sorts of wild claims. However until Sony is more forthcoming about its new console to the level Microsoft has been with the Xbox Series X, and until we’ve seen some comparison of games on the machines, it’s all moot – and that’s before we’ve gotten to the issues of price and exclusives.


That said, the one group of people who do have some legitimate stuff to say are game developers themselves, the ones who have actually been working with both these consoles for months now. A couple of recent articles have had developers speaking about their experience and have advised that the difference between the two on all fronts is more equal than you might expect.


A recent Splitscreen podcast has industry journalist Jason Schreier saying he’s spoken to game developers about both consoles and says the PlayStation 5 will hold its own in ways that haven’t been outlined yet:

“The people that I’ve been talking to over the past few months and the past couple of years who are actually working on the PlayStation have pretty much unanimously all said ‘this thing is a beast, it’s one of the coolest pieces of hardware we’ve ever seen before, that we’ve ever used before.’ There are so many things here that are revolutionary, so many behind the scenes tools and features and APIs.
The general consensus is that both of these consoles are extremely powerful and are both very similar in a lot of ways and both also do different things in really cool ways. These are both extremely impressive pieces of technology. But because of the way Sony has actually presented and marketed the PS5, now the narrative is Xbox is way more powerful than the PlayStation. I think that’s such a fatal flaw on Sony’s part for this console generation.
What I’m hearing from people who are actually working on these consoles is that the Xbox is not significantly more powerful than the PlayStation despite the TFLOPS numbers, and that the TFLOPs might be a useful measurement in some ways, but ultimately it’s a theoretical max speed and there’s so many things that could come between.
I’m getting DMs from developers all the time saying it’s a shame because the PS5 is superior in all these other ways that they’re not actually able to reveal right now. I’ve heard from at least 3 different people since the Cerny presentation that the PS5 is actually the more superior hardware in a lot of different ways despite what we’re seeing on spec sheets. A technically-minded person I talked to who actually focuses on this stuff told me ‘it’s going to be hard to actually market this stuff because it’s very hard to convey what makes a difference.'”

John Linneman of Digital Foundry agrees, tweeting: “The craziest thing about PS5 is the speed of the SSD. 5.5 GB/s is just part of the story – there is a lot of custom silicon in there to ensure that the system isn’t bottlenecked in other areas. It’s ‘REALLY’ fast on paper – a lot faster than Xbox Series X even.”


Others say different. Tech analyst site Notebookcheck says the gap between the Xbox Series X and PS5 graphical capabilities would likely result in Microsoft’s console being up to a whopping 25-30% more powerful than its Sony rival going by the stats they’ve seen of AMD Navi and how they perform in terms of overclocking.


Back to Sony and new patents published by the United States Patent Office (via T3) have offered a clear indication as to how the console’s operating system will function which includes what sounds like a variation on the same ‘quick jump’ feature of the Xbox SX with the ability to have multiple games loaded and ready to jump into almost instantaneously with the UI able to provide stats without having to take the time to quit a game and/or load a game to see them.


Then there’s backwards compatibility. The developers lecture would seem to suggest that only a fraction of the 4,000 PS4 games would be playable come PS5 launch time, but that’s not true says Sony’s Senior Vice President of Platform Planning & Management Hideaki Nishino. Nishino-san tells Techspot:

“We’ve devoted significant efforts to enable our fans to play their favorites on PS5. We believe that the overwhelming majority of the 4,000+ PS4 titles will be playable on PS5… In his presentation, Mark Cerny provided a snapshot into the Top 100 most-played PS4 titles, demonstrating how well our backward compatibility efforts are going. We have already tested hundreds of titles and are preparing to test thousands more as we move toward launch. We will provide updates on backward compatibility, along with much more PS5 news, in the months ahead.”

Finally, analysts DFC Intelligence (via Forbes.com) gives the technical edge to Xbox Series X, but says that with Sony coming into the generation with a sizeable market lead from the PS4’s dominance – it seems likely to maintain that position. They add that Microsoft should be able to increase its share with a much stronger start than it had with the Xbox One, meaning we could see a genuine closer to equal rivalry again like we saw with the PS3 vs. 360 generation. However they say that much of Xbox SX’s success “will depend on the strength of the offerings from Microsoft’s newly acquired studios.”


So far Xbox Series X certainly has had the upper hand with its launch, offering clear specs and have been very forthcoming about their console as opposed to Sony which still has many lingering questions. There’ll no doubt be more to come in the future.

 

[BallaratBulldog]

Honestly I don't see being more power or less a big deal.

this isn't as if we are comparing the Switch and massively impact third party to old games.

unless it was made hard to dev for.

 

[exe ex machina]

Its always gonna be an arms race between the two.

The only useful things about more power imo are ... 1) switching between multiple games without lag, or just no lag anyway, bottlenecking ... 2) if we start moving to augmented reality type gaming and entertainment

 

[Deathly]

I think Xbox will win this next generation imo

This isn't a wild prediction.

Microsoft have essentially been spending the last 5 years preparing for the 9th Generation while Sony has been more short-term focused. A few years ago it was revealed that Microsoft had acquired a big wave of developers to presumably work on new and existing exclusive content, also - Microsoft have been opening up their wallets for IPs that we probably have no knowledge about (They did try to buy Silent Hill for nearly $1B USD). Big concern for Sony IMO as MS is loading up.

If Sony wants to keep their lead heading into next generation or at worst for them, keep it even - then they seriously need to stamp the QoL things for players like backwards compatibility, making PS Now a global feature AND re-adjusting PlayStation Plus.

Those are 3 things that I feel like is in their control, but they're not going to act on for whatever reason because of ignorance. These are the people that literally gutted the Vita System and PSN functionality on the PS3 just because of the PS4's success.

Compared to Sony's most likely train of thought - I don't see sequels to their existing exclusives being enough of a system seller to combat Xboxs' potential library at the start of next generation.