Former PlayStation developer claims that the Xbox Series X is a beast compared to the PS5

Whether you’re going for the PlayStation 5 or the Xbox Series X, you’re likely going to have a great time playing new games on those impressive machines. They’re both capable of making games look better than ever, they’ve got impressive audio technology with which to tickle your eardrums and the new solid-state drive hardware means that you’ll be playing games quicker than ever before.

Testicles to that, I want to see an unnecessary pissing contest between fandoms as they argue over things like Raymond tracing and how many Triceratops are in each console. Right out of the gate, Microsoft clearly has numbers on its side with the Xbox Series X. Looking more like a PC that has had a crash diet, the XSX has a stupid amount of grunt under the hood. How much of a difference does it really make in the grand scheme of things? Quite a bit if you know what you’re talking about.

Fortunately, former PlayStation employee and Studio Liverpool senior Designer and Guerrilla Games staffer Chris Grannell does have that knowledge!  Speaking to the RDX podcast over comments e made recently about the gap between consoles being “staggering”, Grannell detailed how Microsoft was a few streets ahead of Sony in the console hardware race. “PS5 is not a bad console, it’s an absolute beast of a piece of hardware, but it’s just a piece of hardware which is slower on numerous kind of paths than what Microsoft has put together,” Grannell said via VGC.

The machine that Microsoft has put together is a beast compared to what Sony has put together. I think Sony has kind of rested on their laurels a little bit. They’ve got this massive market share and lead and they’ve done a kind of PS3 is what I’ve been hearing. It’s not that bad in terms of hardware and complications and things like that, but just a little bit of they didn’t really kind of appreciate what Xbox were going to try and do in terms of this power narrative.

If you look at the throughput and ray tracing capability [of Xbox Series X] then you start to… understand why developers would be saying it’s kind of staggering. So you’ve got the maths, then you start looking at the real-time ray-tracing capability…  that’s where Sony has been caught off guard.

One area where the PS5 does whip the Xbox Series X’s butt like WinAmp attacking a llama, is in the solid-state drive section, which has so much raw power that it can reinvent how games tell a story. No more time-killing corridors to trudge through or lengthy cinematics playing while the rest of a level loads, as an example. Even with all of that power, the deciding factor in the next generation will once again be the games that are offered, something that Sony realised early on in the decade and capitalised handsomely on with their first-party studios.

“It’s going to be the first party studios that are going to shine and it always is the first party studios that shine until the third parties start to really get their head around things,” Grannell said.

You’re still going to see absolutely incredible work from Guerrilla Games, you’re going to see incredible work from Insomniac – the usual suspects. You’re going to see Sony’s first-party games utilising Kraken a little bit better and quicker [due to] having access to those kind of tech departments and things at Sony, similar to what we were doing with [PS3’s] Cell.

So there is going to be a benefit for those kind of first-party studios but it’s not as plain sailing as it could be in terms of what I’m hearing and there’s a whole reason why they’ve been a bit quiet [and] we’re not seeing finalised hardware and things like that.

Think of it this way: What’s the point in having a Ferrari, if you don’t have the right fuel with which to pour into its tank and take it for a spin? Whatever your taste, there are going to be aspects of gaming that each console does brilliantly when they arrive. I’m not looking at the 2020s as being the age Sony vs Microsoft yet again. I’m looking at the decade to come as being one wherein two fantastic consoles were launched and allowed fans to be spoilt for choice.

Last Updated: April 23, 2020