Digital Foundry's Callisto Protocol's Analysis PS5 vs XBX/S

[thelastword]

Right. So we are in a console war debate again? And the PS5 is the more powerful of the two consoles. Gotcha.

Come on now, I'm speaking of tangible advantages on PS5 of which there are many. It was folly to think XSX would wipe the floor with PS5, yet we've been saying this for quite some time. PS will excel in games that are doing more graphically over legacy engines.

It's really disingenuous what I'm seeing, not just from you but from the media. So many outlets including DF are ready to storm the dev's studio, bombarding them with calls because the game performs worse on Xbox. Everytime PS wins a faceoff, it's some ineptitude on the dev's part, when it's PS, it's because it's weaker. It's been two years, people who believe that PS is weaker are simply too entrenched in MS marketing or have not been looking at the results.

 

[thelastword]

View attachment 131

Alex is not happy, but I think that stems mostly from the shader compilation issues on PC. When you run the game the first time, there is some serious stutter on PC. Now if XBOX was the best version, they would have no problem saying, XBOX is the best version to play, but for now they are losing it. John would have probably tweeted "the XSX is the best way to play" already in one of his famous tweets. Funny how these tweets, especially, best way to play with VRR has slowed down.

He can just play the superior non broken PS5 version. I wonder if he'll set up a video talking about how the difference in FPS matches the difference in memory bandwidth for the consoles as well, that was very enlightening.

It's interesting that VFX thinks that people are crowning PS the superior console, but it's exactly what DF and XBOX fans do all the time at least without any reasoning or arguments surrounding their takes, anytime Series X has higher resolution or something, even games that are clearly badly optimized, they go into a tangent, sometimes even when PS still wins on framerate, but they don't care. I think Hitman had a higher resolution on XSX, then all the justifications and percentages came out to declare XBOX the winner, I think in some levels with high alpha the Series X version tanked in framerate, but who cares, XBOX wins with VRR and a higher resolution. When PS wins, it's always, something is wrong here, I'm disappointed, we've contacted the devs to look into this.

Having said all of this, the game may still be optimized further on Series X, but what I see is mostly people trying to defend themselves from erroneous ramblings on Xbox power in the past, even now they claim it everytime XSX wins. It's so hard for me to understand that "if XBOX was clearly more powerful", why has so many things gone wrong with it. It went from the most powerful console to needing the tools at launch, to needing VRR as a crutch, to ditching vsync to gain performance, in needing VRS to gain performance over PS in doom with worse IQ mind you. People can't keep on thinking it's all the devs fault. PS is just a much better built machine, that's not warring, it just the reality. It took great effort for XSX to match PS in the Matrix demo and the PS version was still superior. So many tangible results to show, that maybe all the talk from Cerny about PS architecture around bottlenecks was not pigeon doo doo afterall......

 

[thelastword]

NxGamer weighs in:

Performance mode on the consoles:
PS runs at a higher resolution on average with better framerate as well. Range is 1188p to 1440p in that mode on the consoles.

Quality mode on consoles:
XSX runs at a higher resolution, averages around 1620p on series X to 1512p on PS5, however PS5 runs better and has raytraced reflections absent on XSX which instead uses SSR.

Series S:
Series S is at 1080p in it's one mode, but it's visuals is mostly in line with the visual cuts seen in performance mode on the more powerful consoles with worse lighting in certain parts.

NX indicates that performance has improved for Xbox consoles from various patches since launch.....



Side Note: As for PC, it seems to be a very demanding game on PC. Kudos to the team for bringing top visuals and making it run nicely at least on PS5 with so many bells and whistles. It's the first game to utilize two raytracing effects I believe, minus metro so Kudos. Yet, looking at Alex's tidbit in DF's video, an i9 13900k paired with a 4090, still needs FSR 2.1 to run this game over 60fps at 4k, so the visuals are quite demanding here.....What's great is that they are doing reflections on planar surfaces, not just shiny surfaces like glass doors/barriers etc.....Doing planar reflections is quite expensive and it's great to see it on PS5 at least.......This is a UE 4.2 game however, so I can't wait to see what devs do with UE 5.0 and above......The future looks bright for visuals....

 

[anonpuffs]

Man is it really necessary to be that hostile to @VFX_Veteran? The personal attacks feel out of line. I know he has a history of stirring the pot, but still...

As for the performance problems on series consoles and pc, I think it's just down to Striking Distance being on the small side for modern AAA dev, having to split dev resources between ps and xbox/pc versions. Also the series s being trash is probably the reason why there is no raytracing on the xbox side as the SS's low memory pool and bandwidth is basically going to make it impossible for most games to run raytracing at any tolerable level. Given that they're probably scaling the series version of the game off the S, it would make sense that the X would also lack raytracing even if it should be theoretically better at it than the PS5 just based on hardware.

 

[ethomaz]

I will just say that like previous years the so called big holiday releases ends performing better on PS5.

That so evident advantage of Series X’s hardware is after 2 years just saw in some titles thought the years.

Maybe it is time to people start to consider that hardware advantage actually doesn’t exists… I never saw a hardware advantage where let’s says just 50% of the games shows it lol

 

[anonpuffs]

There's a hardware advantage, but hardware doesn't always determine end results, look at the history of AMD vs nvidia gpus, sometimes AMD had significantly better hardware specs but game benchmarks had them performing tied or worse than nvidia due to superior driver support or working directly with game devs to optimize their code.

 

[Darth Vader]

There's a hardware advantage, but hardware doesn't always determine end results, look at the history of AMD vs nvidia gpus, sometimes AMD had significantly better hardware specs but game benchmarks had them performing tied or worse than nvidia due to superior driver support or working directly with game devs to optimize their code.

What hardware advantage? Both have advantages in some areas. One has the teraflop advantage and a very small CPU advantage, the other has an advantage everywhere else.

 

[KiryuRealty]

What hardware advantage? Both have advantages in some areas. One has the teraflop advantage and a very small CPU advantage, the other has an advantage everywhere else.

And the system with the edge in Teraflops is saddled with an antiquated, bloated operating system that slurps up that performance edge with inefficiencies and redundant operations.

 

[ethomaz]

There's a hardware advantage, but hardware doesn't always determine end results, look at the history of AMD vs nvidia gpus, sometimes AMD had significantly better hardware specs but game benchmarks had them performing tied or worse than nvidia due to superior driver support or working directly with game devs to optimize their code.

You mean there is a raw GPU power advantage? But raw GPU power is not the whole the hardware.

And that without talking about software (API, OS, etc).

 

[Hezekiah]

Lol, now it's up to 30%, man I remember when it was 18-20%, funny when people only used one metric to make these percentages near launch, whilst PS was leading in more areas including GPU Clocks. The XSX rops run slower, it has worse cache performance. PS5 has better interconnects for GPU to CPU to Memory/SSD. The Series X's mixed 10GB high bandwidth and 6Gb low bandwidth is a huge bottleneck when any game is going to use high end textures or RT. Truth be told, RT loves memory and higher quality RT will require better textures and memory and it will just siphon this memory bandwidth, the PS5's hardware optimizations/interconnects , one consistent and large memory pool will always prove more beneficial in these scenarios.

Yet, it's true, ain't it. I remember Dealer was telling folk Series X will be 50fps faster. Some Ecco the Dolphin dev was saying Series X could do 4k 120fps whist PS5 could only do 1080p 60fps, rumors of the RE8 saga by Golem is still a hallmark at the height of the FUD campaign. Never forget.....People are still having issues coming to terms, 2023 will come with lots of tears for some folks.

It's 30% on here, 40% on GAF

The RAM issue was mentioned a while back, as was how the PS5 makes use of cache scrubbers, but I think those people had their fingers in their ears.

 

[anonpuffs]

What hardware advantage? Both have advantages in some areas. One has the teraflop advantage and a very small CPU advantage, the other has an advantage everywhere else.

Yes, an advantage in raw compute and memory bandwidth. Of course raw compute/bandwidth isn't the whole story and it depends on the game/dev to make use of that advantage (and as you mentioned ps5 has advantages in other areas). The specs are close enough and as mentioned before the ps5 isn't saddled with directx so some games will favor ps5.
That said imo the series x will always be held back by the series s especially in games made by smaller teams.

 

[Gediminas]

Yes, an advantage in raw compute and memory bandwidth. Of course raw compute/bandwidth isn't the whole story and it depends on the game/dev to make use of that advantage (and as you mentioned ps5 has advantages in other areas). The specs are close enough and as mentioned before the ps5 isn't saddled with directx so some games will favor ps5.
That said imo the series x will always be held back by the series s especially in games made by smaller teams.

it is all theoretical with TF. it is theoretical maximum. developers said that never ever console reached it's maximum theoretical power.

 

[Dr Bass]

Well, Epic did call the PS5 a masterpiece of system design. Maybe they were actually onto something.

 

[Darth Vader]

Yes, an advantage in raw compute and memory bandwidth. Of course raw compute/bandwidth isn't the whole story and it depends on the game/dev to make use of that advantage (and as you mentioned ps5 has advantages in other areas). The specs are close enough and as mentioned before the ps5 isn't saddled with directx so some games will favor ps5.
That said imo the series x will always be held back by the series s especially in games made by smaller teams.

Raw bandwidth on part of the memory pool. 6GB are half the speed of the PS5s ram pool

 

[anonpuffs]

Raw bandwidth on part of the memory pool. 6GB are half the speed of the PS5s ram pool

true, very true. idk what microsoft was thinking with that ridiculous setup.

 

[Sircaw]

Man is it really necessary to be that hostile to @VFX_Veteran? The personal attacks feel out of line. I know he has a history of stirring the pot, but still...

You should see some of the stuff he says to me in private chat, it's pure filth i tell you.

 

[anonpuffs]

You should see some of the stuff he says to me in private chat, it's pure filth i tell you.

 

[Sircaw]

Lol, now it's up to 30%, man I remember when it was 18-20%, funny when people only used one metric to make these percentages near launch, whilst PS was leading in more areas including GPU Clocks. The XSX rops run slower, it has worse cache performance. PS5 has better interconnects for GPU to CPU to Memory/SSD. The Series X's mixed 10GB high bandwidth and 6Gb low bandwidth is a huge bottleneck when any game is going to use high end textures or RT. Truth be told, RT loves memory and higher quality RT will require better textures and memory and it will just siphon this memory bandwidth, the PS5's hardware optimizations/interconnects , one consistent and large memory pool will always prove more beneficial in these scenarios.

Yet, it's true, ain't it. I remember Dealer was telling folk Series X will be 50fps faster. Some Ecco the Dolphin dev was saying Series X could do 4k 120fps whist PS5 could only do 1080p 60fps, rumors of the RE8 saga by Golem is still a hallmark at the height of the FUD campaign. Never forget.....People are still having issues coming to terms, 2023 will come with lots of tears for some folks.

Orphan of the machine, that guy lol

 

[TubzGaming]

You should see some of the stuff he says to me in private chat, it's pure filth i tell you.

 

[thelastword]

Orphan of the machine, that guy lol

Orphan of the machine is still the best looking game to release on XBOX thus far. So much great tech. I'm suprised Phil didn't fund a sequel...