Xbox Series X: A Challenging Console To Program For; Bottlenecked Performance?

Crytek’s rendering engineer, Ali Salehi believes the PlayStation 5 will be a better console than the Xbox Series X.

Salehi was interviewed by a Persian website called Vigiato, but fortunately, a Twitter user has translated what the Crytek engineer had to say about the differences between the two consoles. „The developers are saying PlayStation 5 is the easiest console they have ever coded on to reach its peak performance. Software-wise, coding for PS5 is extremely simple and has so many abilities that make the [developers] so free. In total, I can say PS5 is a better console,” Salehi says.

He brought up an example of a similar scenario as well: „A good example of this situation has happened before with the PlayStation 3. The PS3 had much higher FLOPs than the Xbox 360 because of its SPU, but in practice – because of its complications and memory bottleneck and other problems -, it never reached its peak of performance on paper. That’s why you can’t care much about these numbers. But if all parts can work efficiently in the Xbox Series X alongside its GPU, it can hit that number in practice, which doesn’t seem so possible. Besides all this, there’s a software part too.” He has a point there. A bottleneck could impact the entire console: if one element holds back performance, the other components will not reach their respective limits.

He compared it to what we have seen in PCs: „The thing we saw in PCs was DX12 and Vulkan. Without changes in hardware, with a change in the architecture of the software, you can use the hardware better. This applies to the consoles too. Sony runs the PlayStation 5 on its OS, but Microsoft uses a custom version of Windows.” He also mentioned an issue in his opinion regarding the Xbox Series X: „A good example about Xbox Series X hardware is its RAM. Microsoft has made the RAM two parts. The same mistake they made with Xbox One. One part of RAM has high bandwidth and the other is low. And coding for this could be a little challenging. Because the total amount of things we want to put in the fast part is so much that it may cause problems. And if we want to support 4K it will be another whole story, so there will be somethings that will hold the GPU off.”

Salehi compared the Xbox Series X to a V8 engine, while the PlayStation 5 is a V6 with a turbo to have the best efficiency. He also says the Xbox Series X will only utilise its 12 TFLOPS when the situations are ideal, while the PlayStation 5’s 10.28 TFLOPS would be reached more often (this subject has been mentioned recently a couple of times).

In short, the Crytek engineer thinks the Microsoft console hasn’t been designed perfectly, as, on paper, it might be stronger than its rival, the PlayStation 5 would work better in practice, plus it’s easier to develop for. How much of it will be true? We’ll see possibly at the end of the year, as both the Xbox Series X and the PlayStation 5 is planned to arrive this Holiday season.

Source: WCCFTech

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