“Power is nothing without control,” one might exclaim when reading DF’s considerations regarding the community’s doubts about the performance difference between the PS5 and Xbox Series X, with the latter, despite boasting a greater number of TeraFlops, not reaching the performance of the PS5 in many games.
In the latest analysis by the journalist Richard LeadbetterDigital Foundry’s Technology Editor draws on discussions held over the years with several multi-platform developers to reach a conclusion on the now long-running debate that has been raging since the launch of PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X: Why does Sony’s console manage to outperform Microsoft’s platform in many titles?
According to Leadbetter, there are several factors to take into consideration if you want to finally solve the mystery of the performance gap between PS5 and Xbox Series X. The DF representative cites, for example, the choice made by Microsoft designers to equip Xbox Series X with hardware with a split memory configuration (560GB/s of bandwidth for the ‘fast’ memory and 336GB/s for the ‘slow’ one), but according to the multiplatform designers interviewed by Leadbetter, the main reason for the performance boost guaranteed by PlayStation 5 is represented by the development environment itself offered by the Sony console.
DF’s Tech Editor explains that many developers were impressed by thePlayStation 5 hardware efficiency due to purely technical aspects such as the GPU compiler, access to lower-level APIs and the higher clock speed of the graphics component and the processor. The approach adopted by Sony in the design of PS5, according to the developers interviewed by Digital Foundry, therefore translates into a performance advantage such as to reduce and, in some cases, overcome the gap with the more powerful hardware of Xbox Series X.
According to Digital Foundry, however, Microsoft’s approach to designing the Xbox Series X hardware has a number of advantages. The DF team, for example, praises Microsoft’s commitment to Standardization of DirectX 12 and DXR APIs dedicated to managing dynamic lighting effects in Ray Tracing, two factors that significantly facilitate the development of games originally designed for PC on Xbox Series X|S. The larger processing units accessible on Xbox consoles of this generation, according to Leadbetter, will become increasingly important in the second half of the life cycle of current-gen platforms, due to the structure of more advanced graphics engines and a Variable refresh rate on Xbox that DF deems ‘noticeably better’ than PS5.
In concluding this analysis, Digital Foundry therefore suggests that the cross-gen nature of the vast majority of titles that have hit the market in recent years has definitely played in favor of the approach adopted by Sony, but that in the future Xbox hardware is destined to ‘show its muscles’. Already today, the technical analyses conducted by Digital Foundry on Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree demonstrate that the Xbox Series X version is far preferable to the PS5 version due to the greater fluidity and stability guaranteed by the VRRdespite Sony’s machine being able to deliver a higher average framerate on-screen by virtue of the efficiency of the lower-level APIs and the architecture of the current PlayStation flagship.
Playstation 5 Console Standard Slim Edition It is one of the best sellers today on
