After months and months of ‘insiders’ apparently leaking specs for the PS5 and Xbox Series X, we finally have concrete info from both companies.
With GDC postponed , both Xbox and PlayStation decided it was time to bite the bullet and let the world know what they’ve been working on since 2016 ish.
Series X is Serious About Specs
Xbox got out of the gates first as head honcho, Phil Spencer wrote a pretty lengthy blog post divulging everything about their next-gen system.
Spencer revealed the GPU, CPU, memory and internal storage to just name a few.
The GPU inside the Series X will be from AMD and will be based on their next-gen design , RDNA2. This gives series X 12 Teraflops of computing performance; more than double that of Xbox One X when efficiency is factored in.
It has a clock speed of 1.825Ghz and 52 Compute Units. Meanwhile, the CPU, which caused such headaches for developers on current gen consoles, has seen a sensational jump in raw performance.
Gone are the dreadful Jaguar cores which had hand-tied devs. Now we have AMDs ZEN2 CPU clocked at 3.8GHZ. This means that we’ll be enjoying a plethora of games at 60 FPS and Maybe more.
The Series X will have 16GB of super fast GDDR6 RAM and a 1TB SSD which will allow devs to create much larger and more diverse worlds now that they don’t have to worry about loading screens.
Raytracing seems to be the big innovative technology in this coming generation. The tech does what is sounds like – tracing light rays in real time to allow realistic reflections and lighting.
Xbox also invited Digital Foundry and Austin Evans out to their Redmond campus for a complete teardown of the system.
Sony Sees PS5 Speed as Next-Gen Battleground…
Meanwhile, Sony did a ‘Deep Dive’ video presentation with lead architect Mark Cerny, who was originally meant to give this presentation at GDC.
In pure computing performance, the PS5 specs falls short of Xbox with just 10.3 Teraflops. However, that is far from the full story.
Cerny and Co seem to have to put a massive amount of focus on the SSD inside the PS5.
It certainly shows in the raw speed when you compare it to the SSD in the Series X. The SSD inside the PS5 has I/O throughput of 5.5GB RAW, compared to the Series X 2.4GB.
Even with compressed data, the Series X SSD is slower with 4.8GB compared to the PS5 with 9GB.
However, it is smaller than the series X SSD with 825GB of storage compared to the 1TB on Microsofts machine.
Like Series X, the PS5 has 16GB of RAM, a 4K UHD Blu Ray drive, a ZEN 2 CPU clocked at 3.5GHZ and an RDNA2 GPU.
Still no word on what launch games we can expect for the PS5. But Sony have clarified that the ‘overwhelming majority’ of PS4 games will be playable at launch on the PS5.
Price point is another issue that has yet to be resolved with the vast majority. Most seem to have settled on the fact the fact that both systems will cost at least €499.
So, there we have it. The 9th generation of consoles will be launching this holiday season and I, for one, cannot wait to see what games both systems have for us at launch.