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.

Crytek employee says Playstation 5 will win, Xbox Series X has bottlenecks