With Sony’s recent Road To PlayStation 5 we finally know the exact specs on both the PlayStation 5, and the Xbox Series X. While both the Series X and the PlayStation 5 are boasting very powerful hardware specs (significantly stronger than that of current gen systems) it will still be a stiff competition between the two systems.
Power of the PlayStation 5 Vs. Xbox Series X
The PlayStation 5 in particular, when looking solely at the specs, is seemingly underpowered in comparison to the Series X. With only a 10.3 teraflop GPU and 3.5 GHz CPU compared to the Xbox Series X 12.0 teraflop GPU and 3.8 GHz CPU. It is important to note, however, that just because the Series X has a stronger GPU does not mean that every title will be made to utilize it. The SSD in the PlayStation 5 is also stronger than that of the Xbox Series X.
Furthermore, the Xbox Series X is featuring 1TB of internal SSD storage while the PlayStation 5 is much smaller at 825 GB. For any current gen console owners, this may come as a massive surprise given that modern games are reaching as high as 100GB of space. In both cases, the decision was likely made in order to make the consoles more affordable for users. Recent reports have claimed the PlayStation 5 was struggling to find a fair price point that would appeal to consumers while also returning some profit.
It doesn’t come as much of a surprise, that both companies will be providing first party external storage devices to consumers who will need it as we get deeper into the next generation of consoles. It will likely be the case as well, that we will see mid console generation upgrades featuring 2 or 3 TB hard drives
Among some of the more interesting announcements include the official reveal of PlayStation’s backwards compatibility alongside a deep focus on 3D immersive audio.
Next Gen Console Reveals
The bigger surprise was the format in which PlayStation decided to announce their next gen console for the first time. With the series X we have seen multiple launch titles, the design of the console, and the specs while we are yet to see most of these details on the PlayStation 5. While the road to PlayStation 5 could have been an extremely strong marketing event for the company, they focused on presenting a technology deep-dive which turned many consumers off. Many of the details presented featured footnotes stating “goal rate.” In other words, what the console couldpotentiallydo, not what it is capable of.
This presentation was, of course, intended for GDC in which the audience would have been vastly different. Although with only the limited amount of information available on the PlayStation 5 currently, it leaves fans of Sony wondering if Xbox will lead this generation, and if exclusives will be enough to bring excitement to the PlayStation 5.
