Phil Spencer Praises PS5 Design, Talks 'Quietness' Of The Xbox Series X

I'll be getting both consoles, I'll be getting a series X at launch.. I'll pick up a PS5 maybe 6 monthes after release.. Can't afford both at launch and Xbox is my main gaming console so i'll be picking that up first. I'm also looking forward to play alot of PS4 exclusives on the PS5 Backward Compatible, I recognize i missed out on alot of great games in the PS4 Era and i'm looking forward to playing them all on PS5..

The noise of an Xbox is a key factor into why I'm going with them as my first choice next gen. My PS4 Pro is unfortunately too loud on certain games, and it really does hamper enjoyment. My early model Xbox One is quiet as a mouse and knowing the new Series X will also be quiet, that's a big plus in my book.

Another day, another dev speaks out about PS5.

My 360s, and OG Xbox One were god awful for fan noise. Switch, and Xbone S are whisper quiet. PS3 slim and OG PS4 aren't too bad either.

We are a family of gamers too, so we can have up to three consoles going in in the living room and we can't have three fans roaring at us like we experienced with the OG Xbone.

I still play my Dreamcast, which sounds like 100 weed whackers on at once lol, so I am sure whatever the fan sounds like it’ll be whisper quiet by comparison.

My ps4 sounds like a jet engine at all times. Xbox one S is silent all the time. One of the reasons I prefer it.

@Z3u5000 I’m not sure if you remember, but back when X1 launched and some games could not run 1080p, hell some could not even hit 900p, it was a point of pride to make fun of that from the other side (I was on that other side so.)

I always been seeing so many of those same people claim how 4k is a waste of resources, and how checkerboard 30fps is all anyone should ever want... the hypocrisy is not funny. Point being: the fanboys won’t care, but some like me will make the jump (and might had already made the jump.)

My launch PS4 and my PS4 Pro have nothing sounded like a fleet of Concordes taking off, my PS4 Pro in particular, o cleanse the fans out and on my PS4 non Pro even changed the thermal paste but still the same, it is a problem Sony knows about as in both consoles they fixed the issue after about a year, that to me dictates a really poor design and a rushed product to market, plus a poor thermal design.
My Xbox One S by contrast is extremely quiet apart from the hard drive as I can hear that. But it’s cool and quiet and shows a properly designed thermal solution.

I await the PS5 teardown to see if Sony have fixed it this time, but looking at the design I’m not confident they have. Where as I would have every confidence the Series X and S will be silent virtually.

@Tharsman Yes I agree, there are lot of misinformed people out there I have met, mainly influenced by youtube compressed gameplay videos and mainstream tech bloggers (verge, looper etc).

A quiet console is a good console in my book! I love forgetting my Xbox One S is even in my tv cabinet when I turn it on with the controller.

@Thretosix no, trust me the PS4 Pro fan noise has absolutely nothing to do with its environment.

@Z3u5000

I have heard this too. But hey......they got a god-like SSD!!!! 😂

So both consoles will probably cost the same except every 3rd party game will play & look much better on Xbox. 👍🏻

"The PS5 has a really great design. We really like it. We especially like the ease with which you can segment the VLANs and enable QoS at a very fine level. It really outperforms the Netgear we were previously using, though blue power light is a little bright, and we're not really sure what that large slot on the front is used for."

Seriously, though, X1X is nice and quiet. 360 was a menace with fan noise and threw immense heat out the vent. PS3 phat was obnoxiously loud. OG PS4 was a leaf blower winding up to high speed. PS4 Pro is actually a little calmer in noise than "The Eraser" was, but it's still obnoxious. I'm glad for the big fan on the XSeX and there's nothing about PS5 that indicates it's not going to once again be a leaf blower console. PS noise isn't a design flaw, it's just the design they have always used in building their consoles. They focus on the tiniest external box possible, probably for the Japanese market, at the cost of terrible heat management and tiny fans running high RPMs to expel it even half decently. 360 suffered from this too which led to "The VCR" XBone.

@Z3u5000 wait so I’m reading that the thing that stands out to me is the “less expensive”. Are the rumors that the series x is genuinely going to be cheaper than ps5?

You can praise Sony for several things but PS5 is an ugly monstrosity.

Strange some people had loud xbox 360's, I mean I do believe you but guess I was lucky with my 360 Slim, it was almost whisper quiet whenever I played it. then again I installed every game to hard drive so that may have factored in.
When I jumped to PS4 pro, that was a real shock! Played the Nier: Automata demo and it sounded like it was ready to take off from a runway, then the boss fight began and that engine noise changed to 'in flight and on its way'. I actually worried the system was over heating and quit the game and shut the system down. Never owned such a loud console before. This thing was just out the box! That said I've had some good times with it, but gosh that fan noise on some games can be a bit much at times.

PS5 certainly needs to do better on that front.

@xMightyMatt14x Dusk Golem is mainly a youtuber.

He wont know. One quick google shows he is even claiming PS5 is struggling to run Resi Village at 1080p. He is after hits.

It may turn out to be cheaper but I would take anything these "insiders" post with a pinch of salt most of the time.

@TanaD They quieted it down by the time they got to the Slim...that was a whole different architecture inside with a bigger fan mounted on the "side/top" rather than the unit rear (arguably an early example of XSeX minded design, it shared a lot of design characteristics with the launch XBone.) I had a slim as well and it was indeed significantly cooler and quieter. And I do mean significantly. My older Jasper unit might as well say PlayStation on the side.

The fan noise on PS4 Pro is nothing. Get yourself a launch PS4 to hear how a real fan sounds. It includes the peanuts. And 10 biodegradable leaf bags. My favorite part of PS, though is the fairly cheap plastics they use that are just held together with tabs instead of screws. The PS4 Pro gets very very hot.....and you hear the plastics stress creaking as it heats and cools. X1X does not do that. Switch does not do that. WiiU did not do that. Even 360 did not do that (though it melted the RoHS solder off the CPU so that was a slightly worse problem, admittedly.... )

@xMightyMatt14x

Yes. I have heard rumors that the PS5 might be pricier than the XSX. But it’s just rumors, so who knows?

If that is the case, it would be a HUGE win for Xbox bc they would have a machine with way more power plus it’s cheaper too?

🎤-drop.

@BlueOcean

It really is. And apparently, it’s like the biggest console in history. Lol.

@Z3u5000 That is overblown though.
Of course I fully expect that there will be quite some third party games where the XSX may run 4K, whereas the PS5 might do dynamic 4K with the lower border being 10-20% less render resolution just to hit those stable 60fps.
At the end of the day, nobody will notice a difference except when doing side-by-side comparison.

I was actually sitting the other day on configuring Yakuza Kiwami 2 on my PC to hit those 4K60fps. And I switched the render resolution between 80% (basically 1728p) and 100% and it was very very tough finding a difference for me.

People overblow that stuff a bit too much. If you are really crazy about 4K native for third party games or getting those 120fps more often (because the PS5 version may run only up to 100-115fps), then yeah, you probably better get a XSX. But at the end it all comes down to the developer skills.
I always say PS5 might get higher fidelity (more objects, more variety of objects and models, less LOD issues) through the superior SSD pipeline, but XSX might get higher quality of ray tracing (or being able to calculate more rays?) and a slight higher resolution. Whatever you prefer. But the difference between both at the end of the day will be insignificant, unless the dev sucks in optimizing for one of the systems (like that indie dev with his dolphin game running on Unity).

@AJDarkstar no I haven't. I dont think I've ever put a disc in my xbox. I go all digital.

@tatsumi That SSD speed difference generally gets overblown and exaggerated in every media sites. SSD speed can never compensate for the massive CU and memory bandwidth difference by the law of physics. I fully expect an optimised game would have better visual fidelity and overall richer draw distances on Xbox Series X at 60fps, just waiting for a Digitalfoundry review on that. Multiple developers have come out to speak about how some of the rich fidelity is easily possible to run on Xbox Series X without any optimisations whereas it has to be frame rate limited on the other console. There’s a dev who worked on Ratchet and Clank said that such level of graphical detail was possible only at 30fps where if you read the Gears 5 port on Series X back in Feb, it wasn’t even optimised and recoded but still running at higher ultra settings than PC with more resolution, particles, lighting, SSAO.

@Z3u5000
Sorry but you are kind of comparing apples and oranges.
First, Ratchet and Clank is like a Pixar movie. So they might simply prefer 30fps and are ramping up visual fidelity instead of pushing it down. And it has ray tracing (gears 5 wasn’t running with ray tracing), which has a huge impact on performance. Anybody can code a 60fps game, but is the dev willing to reduce visual fidelity for it?
So the dev might have gone and said “let’s target 30fps, what can we do graphically then?”
Nothing more than that. Some devs will ALWAYS target 30fps. If ratchet and clank was on XSX, you would still see it being 30fps but have maybe a resolution bump or render more objects in ray tracing.

And furthermore, the PS5s advantage over the XSX is that it can load only what the user sees at the current moment, plus what he might see in the next second.
This combined with primitive shaders is a powerful tool that helps the PS5 to focus all its power into only what the user currently sees.
That means where the XSX will have to load more assets into RAM for things that are not visible to the user, reducing the amount of unique assets that could be shown to the user.
So the PS5 should be capable of displaying a higher amount and more variety of assets in the same view as the XSX. And before you throw velocity architecture into my face. Velocity architecture is just about textures, whereas Kraken has broader use cases.

The advantage of the XSX is that instead of the above it can render at higher resolution and also allow for more visual quality because the extra CUs allow for more parallel calculations.
The tough part is to make use of all CUs though.
So it’s all pros and cons. That’s why at the end of the day the difference between the two consoles will be insignificant to your average consumer. You may prefer one over the other. Each has strengths in different areas.

Neither the SSD nor the 12tflops should be overblown. But there can be a rare instance of a game that simply wouldn’t run on any system that has a slower SSD Pipeline than the PS5. Or at least not run in a way that is fun to play.
All I’m explaining are the pros and cons of each system. But people just hate it when their beloved console is not the best at everything I guess.

@tatsumi “This combined with primitive shaders is a powerful tool”
As I have heard from some game engine developers, Mesh Shaders are totally next gen game changers in how they have redesigned the graphics pipeline to get better efficiency over primitive shaders.
I would suggest before jumping into conclusions just wait for Digitalfoundry reviews, as there would be several instances in next gen titles where a noticeable feature would be possible on Series X but not in the other console. It’s grossly hypocritical how Xbox Series X hardware breakdown was done by a neutral third party like Eurogamer and Digitalfoundry wayyy back in February but for PS5 we’re still supposed to rely on marketing stakeholders like Mark Cerny and Tim Sweeney. And yes, Gears 5 has ray tracing on Xbox Series X.
https://www.windowscentral.com/gears-5-xbox-series-x

@tatsumi That's a good unbiased explanation. Pros and cons, but like you said, I don't think the differences will be big enough for the average consumer to notice.

Reading all the above comments thinking whatever happened to are the games simply going to be fun to play....

I must be stuck in a time warp.

@Jaxx420 Games are 25% less fun if they run at 90fps compared to 120fps #fact

@Z3u5000
True. I would like to see what mesh shaders can bring to games in the long run.
I’m very much looking forward to digital foundry’s take.
I’m just a software engineer who studied computer graphics at university, so all i can do is “imagine what is possible”.

@Jaxx420 yeah, if the devs really have great ideas and really want to, this next console generation will be a very special one, breaking completely new grounds in what games can do BESIDES simply better resolution and framerates. Both can give devs more power to realize their creativity.

@Octane The way how our minds perceive differences is more logarithmic like, jump from 30fs to 60fps is more noticeable than jump from 90fps to 120fps (unless in VR).

@tatsumi I saw a recent Digitalfoundry comparison between performance of 2070 and 2080S. It’s found out that the former which has less CU count and higher clock speed, the latter always performed noticeably better at higher ultra visual features and settings merely due to it’s more compute units and the extra hardware for Ray Tracing and ML acceleration that comes with it. We live in an era where graphics engines scale exceptionally well across the underlying parallel processing hardware without any extra effort or optimisations. It is due to the innate nature of how vector graphics algorithms scaling generally work with higher memory bandwidth and wider bus, no matter whosoever tells the otherwise. This is coming from a software developer who has background in both computer architecture & organisation and computer graphics.
Very informative video on Directx 12 Ultimate Mesh Shading.
https://youtu.be/0sJ_g-aWriQ
Reinventing the Geometry Pipeline with Mesh Shading - https://youtu.be/CFXKTXtil34

My PS4 sounds like a jet engine, it's really loud, my original Xbox One and my Xbox One X both are silent. Actually, the only noisy console I have is PS4. Wii U sounds a little bit but they're not comparable.

@tatsumi It seems that the faster SSD of PS5 won't make a difference in the end because Series X features technology to only load the required textures plus the mesh shaders outperforming in theory PS5 SSD faster rate. The PS5 has many bottlenecks, the faster SSD is high, the inferior and variable CPU/GPU are low. I don't buy Sony's theory that fewer CUs at higher speed is better in this particular case, PS5 GPU compared to Series X GPU because of the PC tests. Series X is not just more powerful but more balanced. Probably quieter, probably cooler and certainly more powerful, which by the way it's on topic after the where-did-the-fun-go thread whiners. Sorry but it's kind of disrespectful and hypocritical to only do it when the topic doesn't suit your narrative (not you).

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-inside-xbox-series-x-full-specs

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/03/going-for-speed-the-lo...

@Octane It's not really unbiased because it's based on vague Sony's explanation without any hands-on unlike Digital Foundry's take on Series X. If you want unbiased description and features of PS5 in practical terms you'll have to wait but the fact that they didn't want a comprehensive analysis made by independent experts should tell you something.