DF Weekly: If Xbox Series X is more powerful, why do some PS5 games run better?

saltyashell

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11 Feb 2024
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Talking about consoles power when their differences are marginal at best...who cares. You don't buy a console because it's more powerful then the comp by a small amount.
Xbox cares a lot. They heavily marketed the Series X around the narrative. This is common knowledge for anyone who was half awake during its launch.

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ethomaz

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It is so weird this last pic...

The guy says that talked with Devs and they said the power differece is staggering.
It is so bullshit.

Jason (probably one of the few that really talk with devs) in a podcast way before the launch said:

...the people I've been talking to over the past few months and the past couple years who are actually working on the PlayStation have pretty much unanimously all said: This thing is a beast. This thing is one of the coolest pieces of hardware that we've ever seen, we've ever used before. There are so many things here that are revolutionary, so many behind-the-scenes tools and features, APIs, and all sorts of other stuff that is way beyond my scope of comprehension.

...So let me be clear. So what I'm hearing from people actually working on these things is that the Xbox is not significantly more powerful than the PlayStation, despite this teraflops number, and that the teraflops --

This is going to lead to weeks and weeks of talk about how Xbox is the most powerful console, and so on. Meanwhile I'm getting texts even today from developers being like this is such a shame -- the PS5 is superior in all these other ways that they're not able to message right now or can't talk about right now. I heard from at least three different people in the past couple of hours since the Cerny thing being like, wow, the PS5 is actually the more superior piece of hardware in a lot of different ways, despite what we were seeing in these spec sheets.

And of course he was right.

Bonus... people at ERA making jokes lol.

 
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Draven

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Microsoft not only marketed about the power of the console, but they also talked about how the console would run games at 60/120fps. Xbox fans still talk about it to this day.
 
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Evilms

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Digital Foundry still hasn't digested the fact that the X-Series is no more powerful than the PS5. Remember that the XSX has more inferior version to its credit since the beginning of gen than the PS5.

Maybe it's time for them to accept the facts and stop the damage control.
 
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ethomaz

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Microsoft not only marketed about the power of the console, but they also talked about how the console would run games at 60/120fps. Xbox fans still talk about it to this day.
Microsoft created the illusion to Xbots that Series X could run Minecraft in full path-tracing (basically everything in RT) 😂 😂 😂
 
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ethomaz

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Digital Foundry still hasn't digested the fact that the X-Series is no more powerful than the PS5. Remember that the XSX has more inferior version to its credit since the beginning of gen than the PS5.

Maybe it's time for them to accept the facts and stop the damage control.
Remember the tools excuse when the first games launched like Dirt and DmC ran better on PS5 😂
It become a meme.

It a fucking lie to try to damage control at time.

Edit - Eurogamer did a entry interview to talk about the "tools".
 
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ethomaz

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I forget to say a bit more...

What Microsoft did with the memory setup of Series is something so atrocious that nVidia got (and lose) several lawsuit from gamers when they did something similar with GTX 970 and it 4GB of RAM that generate performance issues when you used more than 3.5GB due 512MB having half of the speed :D

nVidia had to pay $30 do each buyer of GTX 970 in US.


But for Microsoft nothing happened 🤷‍♂️
 

Nhomnhom

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They make this exact same video every 2 weeks ……
Always stating it in a way that affirms Xbox as the more powerful console. If it was a more powerful console it would've been consistently beating the PS5 for the past 4 years and that didn't happen at all,, it gets beat by the PS5 all the time including on huge titles.
 
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anonpuffs

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Digital Foundry still hasn't digested the fact that the X-Series is no more powerful than the PS5. Remember that the XSX has more inferior version to its credit since the beginning of gen than the PS5.

Maybe it's time for them to accept the facts and stop the damage control.
Oh, they know perfectly well - and I'd argue they've known perfectly well since the first year when results started coming in and PS5 was even or better in many games. It's just a mixture of ego, being paid by MS PR, and hatred of Sony, that means that they will never openly admit that the PS5 has superior engineering.
 
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ToTTenTranz

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Even after all these years the DF team is still unable to admit they were wrong to just pick on the compute throughput numbers and assume that meant cOnSoLe pOwEr, even after so many tech experts and software developers came out against that very obviously wrong idea.

Not only that, they also went with the "9 TFLOPs average" made-up FUD that kept being spread at the start, even after the PC RDNA2 GPUs came out with core clock numbers largely surpassing the PS5's 2.23GHz.

Ignorant to what the numbers meant, they simply went with parroting Microsoft's marketing material because Sony didn't give them any exclusive insight.




The truth always was that the PS5 has ~15% lower theoretical compute throughput but:

- It runs its effective throughput closer to its theoretical 10TFLOPs limit because it has the same amount of Shader Engines and Shader Arrays (meaning more caches, registers and work schedulers per Compute Unit).

- It has the same amount of ROPs but clocking 22% faster, and it uses the older RDNA1 ROPs that are less area-optimized but have higher throughput-per-clock under certain conditions (transparency? can't remember..). This means the PS5's fillrate is significantly higher.

- It has the same number of geometry processors but clocking 22%, higher meaning it does triangle setup 22% faster (and the hardware triangle setup is still used even in UE5's Nanite for larger triangles).

- It has 20% lower memory bandwidth, but the Series' uneven memory pools with different bandwidths created problems on their own.
Also, the higher memory bandwidth would have helped the most with 2 things: running at very high 4K resolutions (which neither console ended up doing because of temporal upscaling becoming widely adopted), and heavy RT (which neither console ended up doing because RDNA2 was never designed for heavy RT anyways).



This is not to say the Series X's SoC isn't good foor what it was meant to do. At the cost of increased die area, its wider GPU + lower clocks allow it to be more power efficient than the PS5. This makes sense if Microsoft was thinking of a future based off cloud gaming services where they're the ones paying the energy bill and not the consumers.
There's a reason why the Series X SoC was first presented by their "Azure Silicon Architecture Team" and not a 1st-party game developer like 343i or The Coalition.
 

Necromancer

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Microsoft not only marketed about the power of the console, but they also talked about how the console would run games at 60/120fps. Xbox fans still talk about it to this day.
Sony, like Microsoft, marketed that we will be able to play in 4K120 without any problems. Even the PlayStation 5 box says 4K120. They both lied to us that their consoles are capable of that, and that's why I will never trust Sony and Microsoft again when it comes to their consoles.