So far in the fanboy wars over Sony’s PlayStation 5 & Microsoft’s Xbox Series X, we haven’t heard much from game developers themselves as to their opinions on the consoles.
One source, who worked for a game studio that is firmly in the PlayStation camp, has sung the praises of the PS5 even as the Xbox Series X seems to be the more powerful console on paper in terms of specs.
Now though, an engineer from popular indie game developer Crytek has seemingly weighed in. Crytek developed the “Crysis” game series and came up with the Xbox One launch title “Ryse: Son of Rome,” so they know about this stuff and aren’t really allied to either Sony or Microsoft in this fight.
Speaking with Persian gaming website Vigiato (via Man4Dead), in an auto-translated interview that has since been pulled for “personal reasons,” a Crytek rendering engineer revealed that he has a easy preference as to which one he and his colleagues like to work with:
“The developers are saying PS5 is the easiest console they have ever coded on to reach its peak performance. Software-wise, coding for PS5 is extremely simple and has so many abilities that make the [developers] so free. In total, I can say PS5 is a better console.”
What about the on-paper specs showing the SX’s very high 12.1 teraflops count compared to the PS5’s 10.3 teraflops? It seems it’s about more than just compute power, rather all that hardware horsepower has to play nicely together in order to get the best possible performance:
“Graphics cards, for example, have 20 different sections, one of which is Compute Units, which performs the processing. If the rest of the components are next to them in the best possible way, there are no restrictions, the battery does not boot, and as long as the processor has the necessary information, the servers in this mode can operate 12 times of floating-point operation per second. So in an ideal world where we remove all the limiting parameters, that’s possible, but it’s not.
A good example of this can be seen in the Xbox Series X hardware. Microsoft has split the RAM in two. The same mistake that the Xbox One made. One part of RAM has high bandwidth and one part of RAM has low bandwidth. And obviously, encoding this console will have a story. Because the total number of things we have to put in fast RAM is so much that it will be annoying again, and if we want 4K to support it, that’s another story. So there will be parts that prevent the graphics card from reaching that speed.
The main difference is that the working frequency of the PlayStation 5 is much higher and they work at a higher frequency. That’s why, despite the differences in some, they don’t make much of a difference. An interesting example from an IGN reporter was that the Xbox Series X is very neat and tidy like an 8-cylinder engine, and the PlayStation 5 is turbocharged like a six-cylinder engine to the end; it has been turbocharged to the best of its ability.
Raising the clock speed on the PlayStation 5 seems to me to have a number of good things to do, such as the memory, rasterizer, and other parts of the graphics card whose performance is related to this clock. So the rest of the PlayStation 5’s GPU works faster than the Series X. This will make the console work mostly on the 10.28 tflops. But in XSX, since the other parts of the gpu work slower due to the lower clock speed, it actually works a lot at lower Tflops most often and reaches 12 only at ideal situations.”
The source also suggests the PlayStation’s API and OS offer more freedom to developers as opposed to the Xbox which uses a DirectX-based custom version of Windows along with the two different RAM parts:
“A good example of this situation has happened before. With PS3. PS3 had much higher flops than 360 because of its SPU. But in practice because of its complications and memory bottleneck and other problems it never reached its peak of performance on paper. That is why it is not possible to value this figure so much.
In addition to all this, we also have a software section. The example we saw on PC was the addition of Vulkan and DirectX 12. The hardware did not change, but due to the change in the architecture of the software, it would be better to use the hardware.
The same can be said for consoles. Sony runs PlayStation 5 on its own operating system, but Microsoft has put a customized version of Windows on the Xbox Series X. The two are very different. Because Sony has developed software for the PlayStation 5, it will definitely give developers much more capabilities than Microsoft, which has almost the same direct XPC for its consoles.”
The engineer concedes that Xbox Series X would come out on top when it comes to higher resolutions and pixel counts, but shoots down other things such as the Xbox Series X’s touted ‘quick resume feature’ which holds multiple games in a suspended state and can switch between them in the space of about 5-6 seconds. He says the same could be achieved on the PS5 but ‘in under one second’.
He finishes up saying he prefers the PS5 “without a moment of hesitation” and “as a programmer I say PS5 is much better and I don’t think you can find a programmer that could name one advantage that XSX has over PS5.”
The real tests however will come when actual games are played on the machines, not to mention when the price of each console arrives which all could have a major impact.
Source: WCCFTech
