
As the debate between the upcoming consoles for Microsoft and Sony waged on players from both sides are discussing which console may prove to be superior. Now, we don’t love the term console war, but there’s no escaping the fact that players from each camp think their favorite console is superior. And it can be fun to compare consoles and crunch numbers to see which devices the better C.P.U or g.p you and therefore the higher likelihood of having cleaner, crisper graphics.
In fact, we’ve shared a number of videos and the comparison between the upcoming X box series X and the Sony PlayStation five. While there are no real losers in a console war because gamers ultimately win when two companies try to outmatch each other. It’s a little different for game devs. Let’s take a look at what developers are saying about the PlayStation five. Developers are going to need to create games for both consoles. And the way that these consoles are designed is going to play an important role in a number of things. Graphics, for sure, is something that will make a difference.
But when a developer is making a game for more than one platform, they need to develop the game for the lowest common denominator. Anyways, most games that are available on both platforms will look virtually identical. If you’ve watched our breakdown of the Peace five vs. the X box series X, you may have taken away the series X is more powerful and that’s technically correct in terms of raw numbers. The X box edges out the ps5 five in every category except SSD read and write speeds.
Both the Series X and the ps5 five are running off of custom HMD and two hardware. The X box edges out the ps5five and both C.P.U, clock speed and g.p teraflops coming in at three point eight gigahertz and 12 teraflops vs. sonis three point five gigahertz and ten point two teraflops. When it comes to read and write speeds, though, Sony is pushing 5.5 gigabytes per second versus Microsoft’s two point four gigabytes per second.
So while the X box clearly has the more powerful hardware, Sony seems to be faster. But does that even really matter to most people? The speed of read and write doesn’t seem like it’s very important. But according to developers, that’s one of the main complaints. When designing a game for the current gen hardware, having to develop a game with the best possible graphics creates much longer load times. With more games coming out that have massive open worlds, random loading screens completely breaks the immersion.
Not only that, but rendering graphics and elements is a huge bottleneck. The C.P.U and you can render files and textures much faster than traditional hard drives can load them. This is why a lot of games will try to hide their loading screens by having players walk through narrow hallways or take elevators or even staircases, for example. In fact, level designers are actually tasked with creating now or small passageways that players need to go through in order to hide the loading screen.
These passages serve no purpose other than to bring in an interactive loading screen with new SSD technology. The bottleneck is lifted, giving developers the freedom to create immersive worlds that have no random map design and will allow for a more streamlined and cohesive feeling. There’s more than that, though, inside every computer. There’s a component called VRM that you’ve undoubtably heard of. RAM works as a middleman between the C.P.U and Geep.
You and harddrive it store small amounts of data that can be read extremely quickly. When you’re talking about computers, it serves as a way to quickly open apps and store information within the app to access quickly storing information in RAM has always been the fastest way to get that information when you need it. So for looking at the PS4, information is right off of the hard drive at a pretty slow speed, then transferred to RAM where can be access when it’s needed and then dumped when it’s no longer needed.
Having more RAM allows for more info to be stored and shared and therefore reduces the amount of time it takes to load new information. With the P.S. Five’s new SSD, it can basically act as RAM whenever it’s needed. This is called swopping and it’s commonly used as a way to alleviate pressure from RAM that’s in use. If you watch Sony’s presentation at the game developer conference, you may have noticed that a lot of time was spent talking about their SSD. Now we want to quickly reiterate that the game developer conference was meant to be seen, but just game developers.
But with the situation regarding COBA 19, the conference was cancelled. And so Sony decided to stream the conference to the public while the conference didn’t show any gameplay or the console itself. It was extremely interesting for giant nerds and game devs like it showed that Sony was extremely thoughtful in developing their console. And the focus was to get the hardware out of the way of the developers and let them build the most immersive and complete game they could.
And now it’s not like the X box has a bad SSD either. And because of the raw specs of the Series X, it’s no question that both of these consoles are going to produce some incredible looking games. We just felt like we need to get that other way. Like we said earlier, we all win when companies continue to try to one up each other. Now back to X boxes, SSD.
It isn’t slow and low times are going to be nearly non-existent. The real difference is in streaming now, not like streaming and Netflix, but not too far off either. If we look at Spider-Man for the PS4, for example, the game literally loads ahead as you play it. The textures are loaded constantly and are being discarded as you pass them. You can think of it as a sort of fog of war. The further away objects get, the more textures they lose. As you approach an object, say a player model, the game loads more and more details so that when you’re close enough to see their face, you can see fine details such as their hair and teeth.
This has to happen very quickly as players can move radically. The piesse five has a throughput of 5.5 gigabytes per second, which is just more than twice as fast as the X boxes. What this means is that you can stream an insane amount of data into the world at any given time to give you something to compare.
Think of how incredible Spider-Man on the PS4 pro looks. The PS4 pros hard drive throughput is only 88 megabytes per second. If our math is correct, that’s almost sixty five times faster. That’s insane. With that speed, you can now render an incredible. Detail in a moment’s notice. And because this detail can be rendered so quickly, it doesn’t need to stay in the world for very long. If that’s the case, you don’t need the C.P.U and geep you to do such heavy lifting.
This is what Sony is betting on. Whether or not the developers can actually utilize this to its full potential is another story. However, since Sony’s GDC presentation, a lot of developers have chimed in, saying that they’re really excited to work on Sony’s new hardware ready at Donz, co-founder Andrea Pacino has said dollar bet within a year from its launch.
Gamers will fully appreciate that the P.S. five is one of the most revolutionary inspired home consoles ever designed, and we’ll feel silly for having spent energy arguing about teraflops and other similarly misunderstood specs.
Any developer, Kowalski, who works at Kilday, wrote on a forum post. Personally, I am more excited for the P.S. five because of the SSD speeds. Finally, a Crytek rendering engineer tweeted, saying, As a programmer, I say the P.S. five is much better and I don’t think you can find a programmer that can name one vantage that the X block Series X has over the P.S. five.
But then he later deleted the tweet for personal reasons. We believe that Crytek, the makers behind crisis, doesn’t really want to get involved in which consoles better. So for now, they were tracking their statements, but we’ll wait and see what happens. While most developers will say that no matter what, this generation of consoles is going to be insane. It’s nice to look at the thoughts of people who are actually making these games from a consumer standpoint.
We’re very numbers driven. We love to boast about how much horsepower our machines have. But in reality, it’s all about the real world performance. And on that end, we have to wait and see what happens. You can’t talk about developers without mentioning first party developers. That means the developers that work directly with Microsoft and Sony when it comes to first party developers. Sony has been owning that category for a longtime naughty dog alone, has some of the best video games ever made, and that could influence the decision of many buyers when it comes to taking advantage of the new console hardware.
We have to look at the first party devs for a glimpse into the future of what these consoles are capable of. For the most part, call of duties and sports games are going to look relatively similar at first. We oftentimes see the same game released on both the current and next gen consoles, offering small improvements like better sweat detail and Jersey physics. And in shooters, we’ll see better and more particle effects. But when we see the first party developers release games like Halo or the upcoming last of us, that’s when we’ll really get an idea of how powerful these consoles really are.
To that end, Microsoft hasn’t really focus on first party games. The first game is set to release only in 2022, which means that Sony will likely appear to be superior if they release first party games sooner. However, that extra power on the Series X may allow for X box to have better performance later in the lifecycle of the console.
Again, this is completely speculation, but it stands to reason that more power will provide more longevity. Another aspect of the P.S. five that we think is going to help developers make more meaningful games is the sound. Sony placed a huge emphasis on sound, and they even thought of trying to make it possible for just your television speakers to sound like surround sound just by positioning herself on a specific area of your couch. Likewise, the amount of processing power needed to create extremely realistic sound is oftentimes overlooked with the PSP.
High efficiency is the name of the game. Both Microsoft and Sony have dedicated sound cards this time, but Sony really went in depth about what their Tempest’s audio card can do. Sound hasn’t really changed much since the era of the X Box 360 and P.S. three. In fact, jumping to the ps5for an X box one was no different. Chances are you haven’t really experienced truly groundbreaking sound in a videogame.
Until now, Sony says that this new hardware, coupled with a faster throughput of the SSD, can literally render sounds as if it was happening in real time. Similar to how ray tracing renders light as it would behave in real life. Sounds can now be programmed to bounce and deflect off of objects in the environment, giving a more immersive feel that we’ve never seen before. If you combine the new sound engineering and the focus that Sony has on VR, we might see some new gaming experiences that we’ve never felt before.
Just look at the new Halflife game, for example. Valve has always been a pioneer when it comes to bringing new technologies into the gaming world. It’s no doubt that Microsoft is going to try their hand VR. But Sony is really the only one that has a VR solution for console players. And coming off the massive success of P.S. VR, we’re definitely going to see some crazy improvements with PSP are two to wrap up. It’s clear that both of these consoles are going to be killer.
And like you mentioned earlier, as gamers were the ones that are going to benefit, there’s no reason to argue which devices better. And it’s especially pointless until the console to actually come out. In fact, we normally don’t even see massive improvements until a few years after the consoles are available and the developers are really able to take advantage of the hardware in that regard.
The X box has serious multithreaded capabilities, but we likely won’t see that 30 percent boost in performance that Microsoft claims. Until the developers really understand how to take advantage of it. Same goes for Sony’s new storage solution. For now, all we can do is speculate and build hype around our favorite gaming consoles until we can finally get our hands on them.
Based on what the developers are saying, Sony is going above and beyond to create an environment that is easy to develop for and hopes that game devs are going to take full advantage of the hardware available to them and reimagine what it means to create a compelling gaming experience. That being said, we can’t wait to get our hands on the new consoles, and we’d love to hear your thoughts as well. Is the new SSD that Sony cooked up really going to change the game or are they relying on that to cover up the fact that the Series X just outperforms the ps5 five in every other category?