Update 4/6/2020, 11:30am CT: The tweets referenced in this story have since been deleted.
Crytek rendering engineer Ali Salehi discussed Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 specifics during a recent interview with Persian outlet Vigiato, sharing his vision about the best performing next-gen console.
According to Salehi, the teraflops count, which is higher on the Xbox than the PlayStation, is not something players should rely on when determining which platform will have the best performances. As translated on Twitter by user man4dead, while it is true that Microsoft has the highest teraflops count at peak performance, it’ll be tough to reach as “all [the] parts” should be required to “work efficiently … alongside its GPU,” “which doesn’t seem so possible.”
The rendering engineer claims that Xbox Series X will be in a situation similar to PS3, where the platform has the highest teraflops count but doesn’t get to perform at its peak due to “complications and memory bottleneck.”
Salehi mentions that “things that are not related to CU count or Tflops will work faster, too” on PlayStation 5, and this means that “the remaining parts of the GPU will work better than Xbox Series X.”
“This will make the console work mostly on the 10.28 teraflops. But in XSX, since the other parts of the GPU work slower due to the lower clock speed, it actually works a lot at lower Tflops most often and reaches 12 only at ideal situations.”
RAM is also said to be an issue on Xbox Series X since Microsoft has done “the same mistake they made with Xbox One,” according to Salehi. “One part of RAM has high bandwidth and the other is low,” he said. “And definitely coding for this could be a little challenging because the total amount of things we want to put in the fast part is so much that it may cause problems.”
Other details involve PS5’s ability to do multitasking between games in under 1 second, something which has not been shown yet, while Xbox Series X’s Quick Resume will take under 5 to 6 seconds. This is due to the 8 to 9GB/s SSD implemented by PlayStation 5, which means “loading screens are gone from games” on consoles. PC players will be required to have an SSD to have the same performance on their machines, otherwise they’ll have to stick with loading screens.
While this is an interesting and educated take on next-gen consoles, here’s a reminder that this is the vision of a single man working in the industry, and someone else might have different opinions on the specifics. A former Sony dev claimed, in fact, that the power difference between the two platforms is “quite staggering.”
Also, theoretically, PS5’s lower specs are said to be a possible advantage for the Japanese console maker when it comes to pricing.
