Interesting comments from someone in the Dev industry in comments section in the latest TheVerge article on PS5 v Xbox XS
He says Xbox XSX is more powerful and easier to develop for, and Microsoft caught Sony off guard with their initial announcement and they have been scrambling ever since.
Comment 1:
>"Should also be noted that 10GB of XSX’s RAM is 112GB/s faster than any of the PS5’s RAM. That is where most all of the visuals will be.
>The SSD bandwidth is nice, but will not be all that noticeable to most people. Think of a loading screen. 10GB of data going into the system memory on that loading screen would take would take about 1.25 seconds on the PS5 to load with compression techniques and 2.08 seconds on the Xbox.
>Once you get over 2GB/s the load speeds to fill RAM are negligible for most people.
>So to load all approx 13GB of available memory (considering system overhead) it would take the Xbox 5.4 seconds if able to load at minimum bandwidth. The PS5 would do 13GB in 2.36 seconds. Less than half the time, but we’re talking seconds. Once you get to PCIe 3.0 speeds, it really is such a small difference.
>If we were talking 100MB/s versus 230MB/s (the equivalent of the difference between the two) then it WOULD matter because 10GB on the Xbox would take 100 seconds versus 44 seconds for the PS. But once you get to 2 GB/s or so, the speeds really become less and less material and the I/O speed less important.
>The big thing is the much faster 10GB of memory on the Xbox for you visuals. That means more data bandwidth to the CPU/GPU and less missed cycles because of it.
>My guess is the Xbox will be easier to optimize for from what has been released and will present better frame rates and graphical fidelity overall. Will be very interested to see the comparative ray tracing performance and the ability to add HDRenhancement to old titles through some AI enhancement."
>"10GB of RAM on the Xbox is 112 GB/s faster than the PS5. This is where the high fidelity textures, models, etc would all be loaded. These have much faster throughput through the APU unit because of this, leading to fewer missed cycles and more efficient processing. It is likely that the graphical differences will be greater than what the 18% difference in raw power tells us.
>The improved I/O really only relates to loading into memory, but beyond 2GB/s the differences become fairly negligible. With their compression setup, it is likely the Xbox can fill all available RAM in a theoretical 2.7 seconds versus 1.6 seconds for the PS5. Most people will not care about an extra second.
>There is also an APU advantage in that the compute cores and the CPU cores all operate at set frequencies in the Xbox whereas the PS5 is variable. There will be much more optimization needed on the PS5, especially accounting for thermal loads. Microsoft designed the power to be predictable. It is possible the PS5 could deliver more power in short bursts, but cannot sustain that power.
>I would guess when the first titles for both are tested that we will see the Xbox having better visuals and framerates with the PS5 loading it in a couple seconds faster. The PS5 is also more likely to have heat and fan noise issues because of its design, though their cooling stack could tell us more.
>What’s interesting is Sony was pretty light on specifics and did not reveal the look. I’d guess Microsoft is way ahead on engineering and is likely already building spec and prototype out on the upgrade that will come in 2-3 years after release while Sony may only be doing light concepts because it seems they are still trying to completely lock down their next gen console.
>I would not be surprised to see Sony delay the console longer than manufacturing needs and Microsoft to find a way to launch it near on time. It appears MS has a fairly simple manufacturing process and designed for that."
Alexander Scott
Comment 3 :
>"Work in the business. They already are. Optimizing for PS5 is much tougher. From what I have heard it sounds like most multi-platform games may start on the XSX and get ported. The DevKit for the Xbox is supposed to be much better to work and test from.
>I also heard before this Coronavirus stuff that PS5 was behind and might need to delay until summer 2021 while the Xbox hardware was ready. Sony still is not quite completely done with final spec for developers, so there’s some limbo.
>They were not ready to reveal anything this early. Microsoft made them force their hand because they are ahead on the engineering and software side."
Gabriel Ward
Comment 4:
>"Also should be noted that the average speed is meaningless. I work with devs and manage them. Optimizing is simple because you just code to ensure the visual data is delivered to certain memory addresses that map to the higher speed memory and things that never need as much map to the lower bandwidth ones. Audio doesn’t need high speed. This is actually a brilliant engineering bit by Microsoft that will be easy to code for by just how memory is addressed. It’s basically a few lines of code. The stable speeds also make optimization easy because the software does not need to request the system ramp up clocks on the CPU versus GPU, etc. The Sony does and it takes more time to optimize and test to get the right balance. They will get there and find easier methods, but I have heard the Xbox is easier to optimize and code out of the box. This likely means the first slew of titles that are multi-platform may look and play significantly better on it in some ways. I’ve been told it’s basically the difference between the X1X and the PS4 Pro right now based on the dev kits and what was known about specs (I was never told the specs outright, but have been told the Xbox was the more powerful and overall impressive of the two). Also expect that the Xbox will be able to do more under the surface than the Sony, like the AI HDR enhancement of past titles and, possibly, the ability to add HDR to streaming video that doesn’t have it (hinted at from what I’ve heard, not confirmed). Not sure if the PS5 has the memory caching ability of the XSX either, but time will tell. It may not have the same kind of resume function because that requires some special work in the OS and with the storage for it to work right from what I’ve heard.
Caleb Turner
>Microsoft caught Sony off guard with their initial announcement and they have been scrambling ever since
This is obvious to everyone, they haven't even shown the damn unit yet, probably because they are still prototyping to maximise clocks.
Benjamin Perry
Comment 4 Part 2:
>Right now it looks like the only definite thing the PS5 has over the XSX is that it can load a part of a game in 1-3 seconds faster than the XSX. There are some game devs at big studios that have told me for a few months that many think Sony screwed up the architecture and has been trying to fix it, especially once all the leaks came out from Microsoft. I have a feeling that the Xbox launch will be very smooth this time and the Sony one may be rough with a lot of problems. Their internal testing apparently is having some heating issues, so there is concern about Sony’s own version of the red circle of death. That’s one reason why the hardware may not have been show – they don’t have the cooling figured out and they may need to throttle below their reported power to prevent the machine from overheating and shutting down. Microsoft showed its confidence. They brought in outsiders to look at it and use it. Sony has not and had to cobble together a tech presentation after the DF videos dropped. Don’t be surprised if the PS5 comes out after the XSX, even accounting for current likely delays."
>"We also don’t know how well cooled the SSDis on the PS5. MS explained their cooling and how their SSD solution can basically run a constant storage bandwidth. The key on the XSX is that MS touts the numbers, from storage to teraflops to memory bandwidth to clocks, are all constant and predictable. There is no overlock or underlock. You know what speed your storage will go at, what speed your CPUand CPU cores will go out, how fast your memory will be, etc. This makes optimizing much easier because they have made performance sustained and predictable. So we are basically getting a PCIe 4.0 SSDon the PS5. With that comes more heat – that is the cost of the speed. Is there a heat sync? Does it latch into the cooling system overall? Do your add on SSDs need a heat sync or performance will suffer?
Adrian Hall
The only thing Snoy have left is exclusives, and to be honest I can't think of any:
