Xbox Series X

[killster1]

Taken from Engadget:

	PlayStation 5	Xbox Series X
Price	Not available	Not available
Dimensions	Not available	151 x 151 x 301 mm (5.94 x 5.94 x 11.85 inches)
Weight	Not available	4.45 kg (9.8 pounds)
CPU	Custom AMD Zen 2, 8-core 3.5 GHz	Custom AMD Zen 2, 8-core 3.8 GHz
GPU	Custom RDNA 2, 10.28 TFLOP, 36 CU at 2.23 GHz	Custom RDNA 2, 12 TFLOP, 52 CU at 1.825 GHz
RAM	16 GB GDDR6 256-bit	16 GB GDDR6 256-bit
Memory bandwidth	448 GB/s	10GB at 560GB/s, 6GB at 336GB/s
Internal storage	825 GB SSD	1 TB SSD
I/O throughput	5.5 GB/s (raw), 8-9 GB/s (compressed)	2.4 GB/s (raw), 4.8 GB/s (compressed)
External storage	USB HDD support	1 TB expansion card, USB HDD support
Physical media	4K UHD Blu-ray	4K UHD Blu-ray
Output resolution	4K	4K at 60 fps

hmmm xbox series X said this on a diff site.. Performance Target

4K @ 60 FPS, Up to 120 FPS

 

[RPD]

What was all this talk about how the PS5 was going to be more powerful than the Xbox?

 

[cmdrdredd]

What was all this talk about how the PS5 was going to be more powerful than the Xbox?

Power doesn't matter when you have no real exclusives (everything is on PC). Sony has the better games over the last few years.

 

[RPD]

Power doesn't matter when you have no real exclusives (everything is on PC). Sony has the better games over the last few years.

I know, but the fact they are so similar yet Sony clearly has less hardware in CPU/GPU department has me scratching my head when it seemed like leading up to their reveals PS5 would be the one ahead.

 

[BigDaveX]

I know, but the fact they are so similar yet Sony clearly has less hardware in CPU/GPU department has me scratching my head when it seemed like leading up to their reveals PS5 would be the one ahead.

Most of the rumours I'd heard had been pointing to the Series X having an even bigger performance advantage - more on the order of 50% more GPU power rather than the ~20% we've ended up with.

Seems like the Series X is ahead in terms of CPU/GPU power, while the PS5 is better in the storage and audio departments.

 

[quikah]

Most of the rumours I'd heard had been pointing to the Series X having an even bigger performance advantage - more on the order of 50% more GPU power rather than the ~20% we've ended up with.

Seems like the Series X is ahead in terms of CPU/GPU power, while the PS5 is better in the storage and audio departments.

There hasn't been any audio information about Xbox AFAIK, so I wouldn't assume PS5 has any advantage there. At the moment Xbox One has Atmos as a paid option or their own 3D audio format, I would assume it will be the same for Series X. Whether that is the better or worse than PS5 offering is TBD.

Really the big unknown still is price (as well as PS5 form factor). Also, there is still a rumor that there will be a lower power Xbox Series S, we still need to see what that will be.

 

[purbeast0]

My guess is that PS5 will incorporate a lot of the 3D sound technology used in PSVR. The way you can hear directional audio with stereo headphones really is impressive with it. In a game like Resident Evil 7 it was creepy as shit when you would be hiding behind something, and you could hear someone walking and talking as they pass you.

 

[trungma]

Looks to me Sony lost the spec war so they are trying to hype up the SSD and 3D sound. I can't see how an SSD will improve game play much though, at least over the Xbox Series X. I had a SATA SSD and upgraded to a NMVE SSD with 3000 MB/s reads. Guess what? I didn't notice squat on loading times. Microsoft has laid out all the cards on the table and Sony has yet to respond with anything good. We don't even know what the damn thing looks like.

Unless the PS5 at least $100 cheaper, I am not sure if it is worth it. If Xbox Series X can get good exclusives, they will win this round. Although the Xbox Series X name bugs me so I will probably just get the PS5.

 

[purbeast0]

As of now neither of these systems are worth getting at launch. There are absolutely no games for either of them yet.

 

[trungma]

True enough, and anything available during launch would have been rushed.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Looks to me Sony lost the spec war so they are trying to hype up the SSD and 3D sound. I can't see how an SSD will improve game play much though, at least over the Xbox Series X. I had a SATA SSD and upgraded to a NMVE SSD with 3000 MB/s reads. Guess what? I didn't notice squat on loading times. Microsoft has laid out all the cards on the table and Sony has yet to respond with anything good. We don't even know what the damn thing looks like.

Unless the PS5 at least $100 cheaper, I am not sure if it is worth it. If Xbox Series X can get good exclusives, they will win this round. Although the Xbox Series X name bugs me so I will probably just get the PS5.

The Xbox has no exclusives, at all. Every title is available either on Windows or another console. I've said previously that I think it's bad for the Xbox brand. It's good for MS to do this because it offers the opportunity to generate sales of titles to PC gamers, but the xbox isn't as appealing a console because of this decision.

That's what really matters to me. Hardware be damned if I can play it somewhere else without buying a new console to do it. Unless you zoom way in and pixel peep, you aren't going to see much difference at all between the PS5 and Xbox platforms either on multiplatform titles.

 

[JujuFish]

As of now neither of these systems are worth getting at launch. There are absolutely no games for either of them yet.

Agreed. I didn't hop on the PS4 until the Pro was released and there were some decent games out for it. I'll probably do the same with the PS5.

Now, had it been fully backwards compatible with the PS3, that might have been tempting. Probably not enough to get it, but tempting.

 

[Midwayman]

The Xbox has no exclusives, at all. Every title is available either on Windows or another console. I've said previously that I think it's bad for the Xbox brand. It's good for MS to do this because it offers the opportunity to generate sales of titles to PC gamers, but the xbox isn't as appealing a console because of this decision.

Meh. I think there's not a lot of cross over between people who own PCs with specs anywhere near the new consoles and console players. OTOH a unified platform looks good to devs.

 

[WhiteNoise]

I'm also not keen to buy another console. The Xbox is without a doubt an easy decision; no need to buy. Sony has the better exclusives which make it the better option for gaming. I own two 4K UHD players so I don't care about that ability on the new consoles. My Xbox One was the biggest waste of money I have ever spent on consoles. I can count on one hand how many times it has been powered up.

Now I will buy the PS5 is it is backwards compatible with PS4 games. If that happens I will pre-order the PS5. If not I think i will skip this new batch of consoles. Lucky for me, my son is only 5 years old. He is happy with the PS4 and WiiU. When he gets older I can see being begged for the newest consoles. lol

 

[Skel]

Has anyone seen what wireless network card/standard they're putting in these? I'm sure at least AC, but AX? I've tried looking around but I've not seen anything on network speeds.

 

[mikegg]

Looks to me Sony lost the spec war so they are trying to hype up the SSD and 3D sound. I can't see how an SSD will improve game play much though, at least over the Xbox Series X. I had a SATA SSD and upgraded to a NMVE SSD with 3000 MB/s reads. Guess what? I didn't notice squat on loading times. Microsoft has laid out all the cards on the table and Sony has yet to respond with anything good. We don't even know what the damn thing looks like.

Unless the PS5 at least $100 cheaper, I am not sure if it is worth it. If Xbox Series X can get good exclusives, they will win this round. Although the Xbox Series X name bugs me so I will probably just get the PS5.

Games have to be optimized for SSDs. Even on PCs, games are optimized for hard drives which are still very common.

For example, if PC developers set the minimum requirements to a 5gb/sec SSD, they could just eliminate loading screens altogether and just stream everything.

In addition, a faster SSD means you need less RAM since you don’t need preload so much. Thus, the PS5’s 16GB of ram is more like 64GB+ compared to older gen consoles.

I think the PS5 and XSX will have graphics pretty much on par with each other. But I’m more intrigued by the things a much faster SSD will enable in games.

Another thing that is not really talked about is that the PS5 has a dedicated storage decompression chip. It can easily take an entire Zen2 core just to handle high speed storage but Sony has offloaded that to a dedicated unit.

 

[alcoholbob]

Fast nvme drives don't really do anything with games right now, but thats because we load entire levels and the bottleneck is CPU decompression downtime. The consoles are hinted to have special decompression hardware to accelerate loading. If that's the case then the console exclusives can be built around that fact.

Whereas having a nvme drive isn't going to really help on a PC without it and it won't really perform much different than SATA ssds as multiplatformers will still be designed around the lowest common denominator, which for now will be the pc.

 

[gorobei]

for those who dont get why ps5 ssd is important(better) than xb. https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...tem-and-the-future-of-game-rendering.2576498/

this is where mark cerny was getting his numbers from his ps5 technical talk.

realtime streaming is better than trying to keep everything resident in memory. but the game has to be programmed with that in mind, as seen from the dev's breakdown of file sizes relative to disk size and bandwidth.

 

[piokos]

Fast nvme drives don't really do anything with games right now, but thats because we load entire levels and the bottleneck is CPU decompression downtime.

So first of all: I'm extremely skeptical when it comes to how fast drives will change the way games are loaded and rendered (i.e. @gorobei 's link).

But you can't really deny the fact that game loading on current consoles is unacceptable. For many, me included, this is by far the biggest problems with gaming. Not performance, not image quality or resolution.

The ultimate goal is to make gaming loading-lag-free. Of course I don't expect 50GB games to be loaded instantly. But it should only take a few seconds to show something interactive - be it a map or character menu.
In other words: you want to play, you hit a button and you're in. And you can't really do that without fast SSDs.

Whether Sony overspent on this component is another story. Xbox is probably a more balanced package. Whether their SSD offers similarly smooth operation - we'll see after the launch...

 

[jpiniero]

It's like the revenge of carts.

 

[mikegg]

Whether Sony overspent on this component is another story. Xbox is probably a more balanced package. Whether their SSD offers similarly smooth operation - we'll see after the launch...

How do you know this?

There must have been a good reason Sony decided to go for a 5.5Gbps drive + a dedicated decompression chip.

We're just armchair analysts here who know almost nothing about how game engines work or what game developers want in next-gen hardware.

 

[piokos]

How do you know this?

Apart from obviously not *knowing* anything for sure, it's also a subjective matter anyway. So at very best *I think* it is. Hence, "probably".
And why?
Simply because it's a more powerful package. This will make all games work better, from day 1.

As for the instantaneous SSD (and hardware accelerated decompression) changing the way games are developed and improving the overall smoothness of games - I'm a little skeptical, to say the least.
But even if that materializes, it would only affect some of the future games.

Loading times were a nightmare on last gen consoles, but Xbox's SSD is more than capable of fixing this.

Don't take me wrong: I like Sony's approach, I think it's the right direction for all consoles in the future. But that's what it is: a direction. The actual impact on user experience during the next 2-3 years may turn out minimal.

Hardware compression acceleration combined with DMA is something that we already use on server platforms (at least Intel's). It's nothing new and it's definitely here to stay.

There must have been a good reason Sony decided to go for a 5.5Gbps drive + a dedicated decompression chip.

Using a faster drive is probably much cheaper than going for a faster SoC - still creating a "selling point" that their marketing can lure users with.
Also, assuming all the talk about SoC cooling problems were true, a hardware compression chip will take over a lot of CPU load.

With that in mind, since they went for hardware accelerated compression and ray tracing, I'm not sure how they plan to use those 8 Zen2 cores. But we'll see soon enough.

We're just armchair analysts here who know almost nothing about how game engines work or what game developers want in next-gen hardware.

I think this statement is a bit too general.

 

[FaaR]

Apart from obviously not *knowing* anything for sure, it's also a subjective matter anyway. So at very best *I think* it is. Hence, "probably".

"Maybe" would be a better word, as "probably" suggests you're an authority of some sort on the subject.

And why?
Simply because it's a more powerful package.

On paper at least. Some devs seem to have suggested the power of the SeX is more difficult to tap because of its dual memory bus layout.

Using a faster drive is probably much cheaper than going for a faster SoC - still creating a "selling point" that their marketing can lure users with.

That's a bit cynical, don't you think? Nothing in Mark Cerny's presentation on PS5 suggests they did this as a gimmicky ploy, if they had, surely they wouldn't have bothered with an I/O complex as elaborate as what the PS5 has, with the (extremely powerful) data decompression engine, on-chip SRAM pool and dedicated I/O processors and DMA controllers and whatnot. They could have just thrown in a standard 4x PCIe gen.4 NVME drive and called it a day if they merely wanted something to brag about.

With that in mind, since they went for hardware accelerated compression and ray tracing, I'm not sure how they plan to use those 8 Zen2 cores.

Physics, materials/cloth simulation, NPC AI and pathfinding for example...

I'm sure there's plenty of stuff to waste CPU clock cycles on in a nextgen game.

 

[jpiniero]

On paper at least. Some devs seem to have suggested the power of the SeX is more difficult to tap because of its dual memory bus layout.

I have no idea why MS decided to do that. You could say the same thing about Sony not upping the CU count, I think 45-48 would have been perfect. Guess the compromises made pretty much assures that they are planning a mid cycle upgrade.

 

[purbeast0]

Halo Infinite reveal is about to happen.