Digital Foundry has explained how Sony’s current-gen console can outperform some games even though Microsoft’s hardware is more powerful on paper.

Both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X are built on custom AMD hardware based on the Zen 2 and RDNA 2 CPU and GPU architectures. The PlayStation 5 has an eight-core CPU with variable clock speeds (up to 3.5 GHz), while the GPU has 36 CUs (compute units), also with variable clock speeds (up to 2.23 GHz), and computing power of up to 10.13 TFLOPs. There is 16GB of GDDR6 memory with a 256-bit bus and 448GB/s bandwidth. The Xbox Series X also has an eight-core processor (3.8 GHz clock speed; 3.6 GHz for concurrent multithreading) with a GPU of 52 CUs at 1.825 GHz and a processing power of approximately 12.16 TFLOPs. The 16GB of GDDR6 RAM is a shared design (10GB on a 320-bit bus at 560GB/s bandwidth and 6GB on a 192-bit bus at 336GB/s bandwidth). So the Xbox Series X offers stronger hardware and slightly higher processing power.

This had to be summarized because we need to make comparisons between the two consoles. Nevertheless, the PlayStation 5 shows more impressive performance than the Xbox Series X for a number of games (Resident Evil 4 Remake, Grand Theft Auto V’s current-gen update, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War), as explained by one of Digital Foundry’s editors, John Linneman, in the latest Digital Foundry weekly podcast. He has heard from developers that both the API (application programming interface) and the shader compiler are faster on the PlayStation 5:

“One of the big ones that we’ve heard several times now is that the shader compiler on the PlayStation 5 side is just extremely fast and optimized. It gets pretty complex, but it makes better use of the actual silicon in a way that allows the PlayStation 5 to perform faster. That seems like a big deal. Obviously Microsoft wouldn’t sleep on it, they’re clearly working on it, but so is Sony, and developers just seem to prefer Sony’s implementation of it. In the same vein, the PlayStation 5’s main API also seems to be quite fast, faster than what Microsoft is doing with DirectX,” Linneman said.

DirectX is interesting because Microsoft provides an API that’s almost seamless between PC and console, and that can be a bit of a drag on console performance because it’s so low-level. However, Linneman’s colleague Alex Battaglia added that games running on Unreal Engine 5 tend to run better because of the higher CU count of the Xbox Series X, but the higher clock speed can benefit the PlayStation 5 in other engines. The variable refresh rate (VRR) implementation is also better on the Xbox Series X. This is why Elden Ring runs faster on the PlayStation 5, but you get a smoother, more stable experience on the Xbox Series X.

The difference between the two consoles is not significant, but there are exceptions…

Source: WCCFTech