SenjutsuSage
Banned
Really nothing can go wrong with Xbox. Everything is the best on Xbox.
You all keep doing this not so subtle dance where you whisper in dark corners that the Series X hardware is fundamentally bottlenecked and will never achieve the potential of its spec. You all know full well these types of things are nothing more than early development hiccups that will be completely ironed out with time, right? I'll be fair, though, I'd totally be taking my early shots wherever I could get them too, but this is all building towards a fundamental, inescapable reality.
(wanted an excuse to use this gif)
There is no innate flaw in the hardware design of Series X that secretly makes PS5 the more powerful console. There is nothing that youtube "engineers" like moores law and redtech have seen that Microsoft and AMD have somehow overlooked or miscalculated. No amount of Cerny magic can change one simple reality: Not only is PS5 the weaker console, it also isn't even close enough as to be considered "more or less equal in performance" to Series X as some hope is the ultimate outcome when all cards from both platforms are fully on the table in each of their most impressive future games. Series X is just flat out stronger. The reason performance between the two consoles - save for a few edge cases - is looking most often like a wash is largely because Series X is playing with one arm tied behind its back.
How so? Well, between games clearly being designed more around PS5 first and then merely ported over to Series X with, for the most part, the exact same configuration and data organization - which often won't properly address the difference in GPU performance across 10GB of GPU Optimal memory which runs at 560GB/s and 3.5GB of standard memory which runs at 336GB/s for Series X's asymmetric memory design - this ends up contributing to an occurrence where Series X's much larger GPU ends up running into many more situations where all those additional shader ALUs - 1024 more to be exact compared to the PS5 - end up being bandwidth starved.
This is how you get performance stutter that isn't present on PS5, or how you get bizarre performance drops when simple text is being shown on screen. Unless people actually want to believe Xbox Series X can't handle large text appearing on screen in Control without big dips in performance when weaker PCs and consoles manage the task just fine?
On the PS5 side it comes down to nothing more than simplicity and ease. PS5 has a more straightforward unified memory setup where all available game memory sees the same 448GB/s. Asymmetric memory is the biggest factor so far in Series X not showing the gap. It's a memory bandwidth thing, and this is why Sampler Feedback Streaming is so important and vital to the Series X design. It increases effective RAM capacity by 2.5x. So that 10GB of GPU optimal memory will seem more like 25GB. Even scaling it back some, and saying only 5GB of the 10GB (since not all 10GB will be for textures) that still works out to 12.5GB of effective memory, still leaving the other 5GB of GPU optimal, thus pushing it to an effective 17.5GB of memory that will all operate at the 560GB/s memory speed. In this entire thing I've left out and haven't even factored in the 2.5GB of slower memory. And before some of you start telling me these numbers/memory savings are fantastical and aren't at all realistic, I refer you all to your kraken/oodle PS5 SSD compression/decompression posts/threads. If we can/should take those numbers seriously, we can take the far less fanciful SFS numbers provided by Microsoft seriously as well.
Some may call the asymmetric memory design a flaw in Series X, but it's far from it. It was a clever decision to get the power they wanted at the price they wanted. It was either that or 20GB of RAM and price yourself out of the game. The other alternative was going with even faster GDDR6 RAM, another move that could price them out of competitiveness. This is something developers have to design for, but it isn't all on developers. Microsoft has to make it easier, more error free. They need to get more developers actually using Sampler Feedback Streaming in their titles. This is literally the reason Microsoft said that Xbox Velocity Architecture is the soul of Xbox Series X. It's how the console will meet its full potential.
So when I see these early game comparisons and all this talk of PS5 "punching above its weight," another way I've come to look at it is that Series X's basic memory setup seems to be getting ignored in cases despite the very real performance drawbacks of doing so, and it's only because of the built in power advantage that it still ends up easily matching the PS5 experience, or only barely losing till patch arrives, or even having the edge over PS5. But we've already seen cases where Series X clearly outdoes PS5. Hitman 3 doesn't happen by accident or pure chance. It still represents the largest gap between both consoles thus far.