Crytek employee says Playstation 5 will win, Xbox Series X has bottlenecks
In an interview with vigiato, Crytek rendering engineer Ali Salehi stated talked about the upcoming consoles and what it's like to develop for them, and he revealed quite some tasty remarks about the Xbox Series X, it would have bottlenecks that limit its performance, favoring the Playstation 5.
You can always leave it up-to Crytek to create some controversion on the web. Prior to talking about the actual hardware differences, Salehi talked about the platform in general with persian based Vigiato, stating, “The developers are saying that the PS5 is the console for which they coded the most easily at peak performance. On the software side, coding for the PS5 is extremely simple and has so many skills that developers are free. In short, I can say that the PS5 is a better console. "
But why would it be difficult to achieve peak performance on the Xbox Series X then? Well, Salehi stated that the Xbox Series X generally works below the 12 TFLOPs that Microsoft claims, there are bottlenecks that limit the GPU, and you have to achieve perfect conditions of use of resources to be able to use those 12 TFLOPs, which in practice is very difficult to achieve. He claims that this is challenging in practice, notably in terms of getting all components to work in unison.
The GPU may have 20 different parts. CUs are just one part of it. They do the processings. Meanwhile, IF all the other parts are in their best condition, not being limited, without memory bottlenecks, and the CUs get as much as the data they need in a second, Then the CUs are capable of doing 12T floating-point operations in a second. So in an ideal world where we remove all limits it’s possible. But in reality, it’s just NOT.
Salehi points to the Xbox Series X’s RAM to illustrate his point:
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 definitely 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.
Compute Unit count then, (36 for the PS5 and 56 for the XSX), Salehi mentions to the PlayStation 5’s higher frequencies as the deciding factor.
The main difference is that CUs frequencies in PS5 is a lot more and work at higher frequencies. aising the clock speed has some benefits like in memory, rasterizer, and every other part of the gpu that its efficiency depends on clock speed, things that’s not related to CU count or Tflops, will work faster too. So the remaining parts of the GPU will work better Than XSX. This will make the console work mostly on the 10.28 Tflops. But in XSX, since the other parts of the gpu work slower due to the lower clock speed, it actually works a lot at lower Tflops most often and reaches 12 only at ideal situations.
These bottlenecks would include not only aspects such as hardware, such as "Slower GPU parts due to lower frequency" and "lower bandwidth memories", but also software, since Microsoft is running an operating system based on Windows 10, while Sony runs a much lighter operating system designed exclusively for the console.
So yeah, despite the Xbox Series X having a raw power edge over the PlayStation 5, a rendering engineer at developer Crytek says Sony’s console is the better of the two.
Meanwhile, Ali Salehi, the developer who made these comments about PS5, has apparently retracted his statements from Twitter. The interview itself has been pulled offline, too.
Senior Member
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Wasn't some of this speculative although with the NDA I guess stating speculative and mixing it with public info might be for the best to avoid any problems and Crytek plus the users LinkedIn credentials and other posts yeah they should be pretty valid.
...Plus the site and source I saw it from went into a bit of console warring (How unexpected! ~) and sifting through that and the more useful bits of info and translations took some reading of all kinds of next-gen speculative and guessing and platform preferences ha ha. - https://www.resetera.com/threads/crytek-engineer-ps5-better-console-easier-to-reach-peak-performance.179612/
EDIT: Ah but I guess even that caused some issues and the original tweets were since removed.
Considering that the tweets the thread is based on have been removed, there's really not much more to discuss. If new news gets posted, a new thread can be created.
Well eventually later this year there will be more info available and in the end the games will decide the more popular and successful platform although the tech differences will be a fun little detail too.
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One developer says and therefor your expectations are met?
Sounds like bias to me.
Would you agree so quickly if he had said the opposite?
Hypervisor overhead with todays hardware optimizations, especially when you can design it so close to the metal is.. neglibile.
Hence why it's no surprise it wasn't mentioned once in the article.
Before the PS3 was even released Devs also tauted it as the far more powerful machine.
Then most games looked better on the Xbox 360 because it was extremely hard to develop for the PS3.
We will just have to wait and see for actual results.
But I doubt it's hard to develop for either console, x86 is no mystery and the hardware in these things is pretty tame.
The most interesting challenges for developers will be in the new ways to approach asset streaming given the extremely fast storage.
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"better" and "win" are perhaps not the right words. What he seems to have said is the PS5 is better balanced and easier to code for so it's not going to loose as badly which is a bit different. That said they are consoles, devs always extract the max from them as they are a fixed platform, hence being a bit harder to code for will in the end not matter much.
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Basically to me this sounds similar to the ps3 situation, where it has all the horsepower in the world but if youre bad at coding or dont want to take the time it will be a worse game (had many examples in this generation wehre the 360 ran games so much better), but if taken the time you can get games like last of us to run.
It is kind of odd they chose two ram pools, unsure if this was due to money or some other bottleneck that xbox had to live up to. But can see it stopping the system rather than one set ram across the whole system. still this generaion seems interesting.
I think playstation might do really well again, console gamers tend to prefer a cheaper option where possible, specially if there is a big difference. Only issue right now is sony havent shown much or well anything really beyond hard ware specs. So be interesting to see if there will be a delay or not as that could shake up who might "win" the generation. Sadly for me, xbox just has very few reasons to even buy, xbox one x is on a sale due to them stopping it now and checked it out games included and they don't have any real exclusives to make me want to buy it. maybe this generation might change that, as Sony won me on that front with amazing games like God of War and horizon zero dawn and spiderman.
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I suspected as much, the Xbox hypervisor is a fair bit of overhead.