Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 Specs Compared - Article
by William D'Angelo , posted on 07 July 2020 / 12,399 Views
This week Microsoft and Sony have unveiled the specs for their next generation consoles, the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, respectively. In this article we will be doing a quick rundown comparing the specs of the two consoles.
Both consoles will be an AMD Zen 2 CPU with eight cores. However, the Xbox Series X CPU has a peak frequency of up to 3.8GHz per core when SMT - hyper-threading - is disabled, while the PS5 has a peak frequency of up to 3.5GHz.
Both consoles are using a custom AMD RDNA 2 GPU, however the Xbox Series X has a slightly more powerful GPU. Microsoft's console has a GPU with 12 teraflops of compute performance with 3328 shaders allocated to 52 compute units locked at 1.825GHz. The PS5 has a GPU with 10.28 teraflops of peak compute performance with 36 compute units at a peak of 2.23GHz.
The Xbox Series X and PS5 both have 16GB of GDDR6 memory. However, the memory bandwidth does vary. The Xbox Series X has 10GB at 560GB/s and 6GB at 336GB/s, while the PS5 has all 16GB at 448GB/s.
When it comes to storage the Xbox Series X includes a 1TB Custom NVMe SSD and the PS5 includes a custom 825GB SSD. The Xbox Series X has room for a 1TB expansion card and external storage support for a USB 3.2 HDD and the PS5 has an NVMe SSD Slot and support for a USB HDD. Both consoles include a 4K UHD Blu-ray Drive.
Both consoles have support for hardware accelerated ray tracing. It is built into the shaders for both consoles.
The Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 will launch in Holiday 2020.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Small differences in most specs vs a big difference in storage speed. We'll see which approach has the bigger impact and at what cost.
Yeah, with a minor difference in price, MS will just take a little more loss per unit and match the price.
Small differences maybe, however it will label that the best 3rd party games will be played best on Series X and that's a huge marketing feat.
That SSD in the PS5 is likely going to be really expensive. Consider that most good 1 TB NVMe drives today are on the order of $200, and they don't come close to 5GB/s.
They look pretty similar, which is good.
Games should be higher res on series x and hopefully the frame rates should be smoother thanks to that amazing memory bandwidth.
Price will matter more than the spec disparity. I would guess $499 for both given the storage medium.
Yeah, 500$ seems to be the price for these consoles. Neither 400$ or 600$ is in discussion anymore IMO. Great specs all around, cannot wait to see what developers will make on these beasts :-D
So in the grand scope of things the hardware differences are minor (again). It mostly just comes down to brand loyalty and exlucives, unless there's a pricegap, but if there is one I doubt it'll be by much.
There's also the future competition from switch 2.
So the Xbox will have 2Tf more Power and the Ps5 will have faster loading times........
I am no expert, but CPU seems to be the most important factor for speeding up load times, then storage medium. I am skeptical if this IO Throughput will matter but I guess we'll see in practice.
More than just loading times. PS5’s SSD will be so fast it can render assets in game, freeing up a lot of stress on the GPU and CPU, making the 10.3 number a lot more significant than XSX’s 12. XSX comes with a lot more bottlenecks, so it needs the higher performance ceiling to still deliver the desired resolution and framerates.
@Dialga - If that was the case I'm surprised more aren't hyping this. I'd say lets wait and see.
What these 2 will display will be identical.
Why were you 2 downvoted? This is pretty much a given. 3rd party games will virtually look and run the same for the average consumer, and exclusives/marketing will differentiate them.
No they wont look the same. There will be an edge. Think about it this gen, the X1 had a slightly faster CPU and the PS4 had a slightly more powerful GPU. The Series X has both advantages so expect more bells and whistles than we saw this generation.
