Xbox Boss 'Felt Good' After Watching Sony's PS5 Show

In Phil I trust. 👍🏻

A reasonable price and fresh, new software (not halo) will do wonders for them. They will do better next gen than this that's for sure.

I'm glad Phil Spencer is in charge. He's definitely the coolest guy in gaming. Like someone else has said, in Phil we trust!

I always find it weird how Phil talks like that. 'They do what they do and they did that'.😂

Exciting times for Xbox. I hope it delivers cause I am pumped!

This event is going to be the highlight of this atypical "E3".

@JON22 Hey, he's relatable, that's what matters lol

When you look at the Sony event, most of it was, at best, similar to what MS had already presented. They chose to show more first party games but most of the games were still lacking actual game-play - something the MS show in May was criticised for and of course we already knew what the console looked like, inc the ports from previous reveals. Not many big 1st Party games appeared to be launch titles either so MS could have a stronger Launch line-up.

The XB1 on paper had a stronger launch line-up too - Forza 5, Dead Rising 3, Ryse etc vs Knack and Killzone so its also important to have a strong line-up beyond launch too but I can see why Phil would be feeling confident right now...

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@MasterkillerX Yeah, he is a great guy but nobody's perfect!

i mean....what's he supposed to say? "as soon as i saw Ratchet and Clank i knew we were F$CKED, man! I cried myself to sleep...Made a new resume for Indeed...."

Enough talk. Show the goods!

After this generation, Xbox has an enormous mountain to climb with this new platform. It will be interesting to see what unfolds in 2021.

I think the way the Xbox team have been and remained very confident all year long, indeed since they first announced the Series X speaks volumes. I’m looking forward to their July event. I’m currently leaning more towards a Series X depending on price.

Xbox Series X is my final winner. I pick Xbox Series X because I love ❤ Xbox Series X. I'll admit it I like PlayStation 5 but my heart ❤ is on Xbox Series X.

Here's hoping my country, the Sonyland known as Italy, will eventually snap out of its cultish love for the PS brand.

I'm not even talking about fanboys, or fans who at least state their reasons to be so. I'm specifically referring to the average Italian. I've read one fan's impressions of The Last of Us Part II, and the "review" was nothing short of appalling - "the combat feels real, visceral, there's blood splattering"... because that's what matters in a game, right? Ugh.

I didn't like The Last of Us except for the excellent acting (motion capture and original voice acting) because gameplay is a bit rubbish so I didn't play II but the people that I know that have played II say that they prefer the first one. In any case, I think that Sony's games are generally overrated. I don't know if it's because everyone expects Sony's narrative games to be awesome just because or because games that are like interactive films are preferred by most reviewers.

Agreeing with the comments, he wasn't exactly going to say he felt bad, and it is still early days in reveals, not everything has been announced on either side yet and for the most part, many games from each side's reveal will come to the other at some stage.

I do remain unconvinced that there's truly a hardware advantage. OK maybe it'll push a few extra frames here and there on a classic game but the PS5 is likely going to excel in audio, haptics, loading times and open worlds. I think it's very tit for tat this gen, there's ups and downs to each.

@GMScribe In theory, Series X is quite more powerful than PS5. How that will affect games remains to be seen but the difference is significant. PS5 SSD is twice as fast but will it really matters when Series X SSD is fast enough? We'll see.

@Medic_Alert I think it's more to do with the fact Microsoft have relied on Halo, Forza and Gears for far too long, whereas Sony have quite a long line of games series.

@Medic_Alert no I mean games from Microsoft game studios.

PS3 struggled early on before Sony bulked out its in house teams and started creating new ips.

@Medic_Alert I totally agree.

@BlueOcean I think the theory actually conveys a fairly level playing field, it's the reality I'm not sure about, here's why:

On the face of it:
PS5 GPU Teraflops: 10.28, CPU (SMT): 3.5GHz
Xbox GPU Teraflops: 12.115, CPU (SMT): 3.6GHz
Difference: 17.85% / 2.85%

However, once you dig deeper:

• Teraflops is only a measure of the Vector ALU performance.
• PS5 GPU has a clock speed 22.19% faster, so other parts of the GPU, the cache, the rasterizer etc run faster.
• PS5 GPU has fewer CUs (in exchange for a higher clock), it's easier to fill fewer CUs with useful work in practise.
• The PS5 SSD performs on average at 8-9GB/s (20GB/s peak) compressed vs Xbox at 4.8GB/s compressed.
• Microsoft have been sparse on the SSD details, their 4.8GB/s suggests 37% better compression than Sony, but as far as
  we know, their hardware compression is zlib and so it should be 10% worse than the PS5's Kraken, so take the 4.8GB/s
  with a BIG pinch of salt, using Sony's ratios minus 10% you'd expect to see 3.76GB/s on the Xbox, or alternatively
  apply Microsoft's ratios to the PS5 + 10% and you get 11.55GB/s.
• PS5 SSD has 16 priority levels vs the standard 2, making it easier for developers to have the data they need when they need it,
  potencially reducing the number of wasted cycles waiting for data or poping/loading times.
• PS5 has a bespoke cache scrubber on the GPU, when RAM is updated with SSD data, its cache is scrubbed, improving its
  performance by wasting less GPU cycles.
• Xbox achieves its performance partly through split speed GDDR, 10GB is faster than the PS5, whilst 6GB is slower,
  this will take developers more effort to optimise for as they decide how to split their usage of the RAM.

I'm sure there are plenty of details we still don't know about both consoles, but I think once you consider some of these
architectural differences, the picture looks much less clear cut that simple teraflop and GHz numbers would have you believe.

I do also believe that extra SSD speed can go a long way. The Xbox SSD is fast enough to speed up the loading time of classic games,
but we're about to enter an era of games with no limits, where even as your character turns around new textures are being loaded, allowing
for endless draw distances, no popping, higher detail, more variety, more players, no loading passagways etc. In that world, a faster SSD
is the difference between how fast your character will be allowed to turn or the number of players on a map all casting different spells etc.

@GMScribe However, Sony said that PS5 uses a capped common power of pool for both CPU and GPU and that the they won't be able to run at full speed at the same time. Series X CPU is 3.8 GHz or 3.66 with simultaneous multithreading constantly, PS5 CPU is up to 3.5GHz without SMT (slower than 3.5 GHz with SMT) so the difference is bigger than what you posted. PS5 GPU is up to 2.23 GHz but variable. Both the CPU and GPU of PS5 are variable while Series X CPU and GPU clocks are sustained.

"Xbox achieves its performance partly through split speed GDDR, 10GB is faster than the PS5, whilst 6GB is slower, this will take developers more effort to optimise for as they decide how to split their usage of the RAM".

If you think that this is a challenge for developers, just imagine dealing with variable CPU and GPU speeds that share a common pool of power on PS5. Besides, not all RAM is used for graphics, the slower RAM (336GB/s) will be used for other purposes while the faster RAM (560GB/s) will be used for graphics and is 25% faster than the PS5 RAM.

"PS5 GPU has fewer CUs (in exchange for a higher clock), it's easier to fill fewer CUs with useful work in practise".

How much this is really true remains to be seen, to me it sounds like the only argument that Sony can say because the GPU is inferior, along with...

"I do also believe that extra SSD speed can go a long way".

Developers say that Series X is extremely fast, so I think it's likely that the faster SSD of PS5 will hit a bottleneck except for loading times which may be 50% faster on PS5, which means that instead of loading a game in 2 seconds it will take 4 seconds on Series X. This is something discussed in one of Digital Foundry articles.

Anyway, it's nice talking to you but we will have to wait until the consoles are out so we can measure the real clocks of PS5 (which are estimated by many websites to be 2.0 GHz for the GPU, 9.2 TFLOPS) and to see how the differences between both consoles will affect games. I'm sure that Digital Foundry will show us but I also think that the launch third-party games, those that are easy to compare, won't use the new consoles at their fullest potential.

We'll have to be a bit patient then until consoles and games are available.

@BlueOcean So some of this isn't quite the case, it's true that Sony has a common power pool, however it's not actually true that you can't run the GPU and CPU at maximum clock at the same time. Power consumption isn't just linked to clock, it's also driven by how many transistors are working at any one point in time. For example if you're performing heavy AVX calculations on the CPU, it's going to consume a lot more power than working through a normal pipeline. As Sony puts it, it'll be working at maximum clock the vast majority of the time, if needed; it's when you perform certain combinations of actions that use a lot of energy, it'll drop the clock, but only by a few percent, as a small drop in clock gives a big improvement in power consumption. These changes are 100% predictable, repeatable and thus profilable.

The PS5 CPU also does have SMT, Sony just never pointed it out because the cases where you wouldn't use SMT are pretty-much non-existent, it's largely marketing blurb to allow a higher clock speed to be quoted. SMT is just AMD's version of hyper threading, which comes as standard in all of their CPUs; in a nutshell, the PS5 has 8 cores, with 16 hardware threads (SMT).

Quite rightfully as you say you could use some RAM for the GPU, some for the CPU and if used correctly this would yield a performance boost, but there are a lot of challenges and choices a developer might face. What if they want to use more than 10GB for the GPU? How can they write their engine to somehow manage the difference in speed for the extra data, is there going to be an algorithm, will that itself eat up performance? What if they want to transfer a lot of data between CPU and GPU, will that data always have to be limited in speed or do they transfer it over to fast RAM? But that takes bandwidth. What if suddenly the CPU becomes the bottleneck, do they have to rethink how all this will work? And remember, what the PS5 does have going for it here is a much faster cache for prefetching from RAM. Also, most developers are 3rd party and coming from PS5 or PC to Xbox or going there after Xbox, they don't want to have to deal with this customisation.

The amazing thing about the SSD on both the Xbox and PS5 is that other than asking for a file to be loaded, there's no CPU intervention at all, they really do run at full speed, all the time, loading data directly into RAM. Subtle differences in performance on the CPU/GPU aren't going to impact that - you load the model into RAM, the GPU renders it and as I mentioned Sony actually reduces a bottleneck here specifically with cache scrubbing. I haven't really spoken about it but the new Geometry shaders on both consoles are also a key component to this, they can handle vertex manipulation traditionally done by the CPU and they can cull any non-visible vertexes, allowing you to have large levels of model detail at a very low cost to bandwidth and performance (this was key to the UE5 PS5 demo).

@BlueOcean Going back to the power pool, Sony's plan is pretty clear, it's to make the console cheaper and keep the fan quiet. They expect most early games won't be able to keep the CPU and GPU both close to 100% utilisation for a long time, and that has traditionally been the case with most consoles and meanwhile they've made it easier to get there as soon as possible by keeping the system balanced and easy to work on. By the time developers start hitting the upper limits that cause notable clock drops, we'll already be looking to the mid-gen refresh i.e. PS5 Pro and Xbox equivalent, for anyone who cares about maximum performance.

@GMScribe Yes but that part (6GB) of the RAM of PS5 is faster when most (10GB) is slower than Series X and the twice as fast SSD is a quite limited advantage for PS5 considering CPU runs at 3.8 GHz on Series X and up to 3.5 on PS5 and the GPU of Series X is superior (12 TFLOPS vs. up to 10 TFLOPS). That's what matters the most. If Series X had a HDD then yes, the difference in speed would be huge, but it's not the case. About third-party games I don't think that they will be designed for PS5 and then adapted to Series X but most likely optimised for Series X and Windows and then scaled down for PS5.

I can't wait to see how developers deal with the variable clocks of PS5 because the peaks are lower than Series S sustained clocks. We'll see soon!

@BlueOcean Haha coming back to initial point of the discussion & just trying to say "that's what it is" then what was the point of all discussion above . Its like Hence Proved without any proofs . Dude , what @GMscribe has mentioned is correct so stop being a nut . Moreover am worried that how the performance of games will be on xbox as it depends on developers to optimize & xbox can hold some further advancement due to its different philosophy in hardware architecture as PS5 . Development on ps5 is more easy and if more fidelity can be put in a game , xbox can hold it as it will require more hardwork to bring the same on it, that is what make me worry more & I don't wanna see this happening bcs of either console .

@ishaajo840 You are the nut here I think. I will quote that comment under the Digital Foundry articles. 😂

@BlueOcean Seems like a fan-kid writing on forums …

@ishaajo840 That's what fanboys without arguments say here lately so I guess you're describing yourself too. 😂

@BlueOcean Go watch Pogo .. Kid

@ishaajo840 So mature... 😂

before uploading the full interview I watched it over and over and guess what..in this part he obviously made fun of sony lol https://youtu.be/a_ZD6mEaBdM

Phil very self-confident. I am looking forward to real launch to finally compare consoles in real world coditions. I think that xbox is not gonna win next generation, but It will be much more closer in terms of HW sales.