With Sony releasing the specs for the PS5 yesterday, I thought I would do a comparison between that and the Xbox Series X to give you a sense of which console would be better for you, and a sense of just how powerful consoles are becoming.
Xbox Series X
The Xbox Series X is going to be a very powerful console for sure, on par with some of the better gaming PC setups just by going from these specs. Digital Foundry did a deep dive into the hardware and what the system is capable of, which you can read here if you are interested. If you want to see what Xbox has to say about their new hardware, check out the Xbox Wire blog post, as well as their list of terminology for the next generation console.
PlayStation 5
Okay, so I watched the stream on the PS5 from Sony, and honestly it seemed like a college lecture. It was originally designed to be given at GDC, so that’s to be expected. I couldn’t get much out of it, but thanks to Digital Foundry we have specs for the PS5, at least those that have been confirmed by Sony. It looks to be comparable to the Xbox Series X, so it may boil down to their proprietary technology as to who comes out on top, as well as price points.
So you’re reading these specs and probably wondering “What is a TFLOP and why should I care?” Well a TFLOP, short for teraflop, stands for “Trillion Floating-point Operations Per Second”. This is a measurement of how many calculations a GPU can do per second. This is super important for processing, and more teraflops has been touted as always better. The PS5 seems to not be on that bandwagon, but still a little over ten calculations a second is nothing to laugh at for a console.
Other things worth noting:
- Xbox has two different speeds for memory bandwidth while PS5 has one. Is there a reason for this? Maybe, but I don’t know for sure.
- The PS5 has only an 825GB custom SSD while the Xbox has a 1TB custom SSD with expandable memory via custom Seagate 1TB SSDs that slot into the back of the console. Sony said yesterday that they’re projecting to be able to slot in open market M2 SSD cards as expandable memory by the end of this year, but they have to get faster first.
- The I/O output, how fast data is read and transferred in the SSD, is double that of the Xbox, but it will be interesting how they perform on the same game to see who is really faster.
- Both have a 4K UHD Blu-Ray disk drive. Physical game holders rejoice! This also means you can probably watch those fancy 4K Blu-Ray movies on your new consoles and not have to have a separate player for it, something I’m going to be trying because I really like movies.
This is a lot of specs to take in, but hopefully it gives a better sense of what consoles are evolving into and what can expect from them once they release. To me this is exciting, but still not enough to give up my reliable PC. What are your thoughts? Leave a comment below!
