PS5 or Xbox Series X?
So far this week, as the world shuts down because of the COVID-19, the gaming world is already looking to the next generation console launches planned for the holiday season of 2020.
As I sat and watched both reveals I noticed how different one was compared to the other, on one hand Microsoft is showing off the new console, even offered a breakdown view of the different component, for Sony it was a complete polar opposite, I found myself wondering where this was going, all the techno jargon used was definitely not for the non techno say people, and even then it was so technical that I could barely keep myself from yawning. Suffice to say that one was geared towards the developers and the other was more customer friendly.
Currently to compare, we will have to go with what was revealed and that is comparable. Often mentioned during the Sony presentation, the hardware is proprietary and most of it was designed special for the next generation console. Solid State Drive or SSD, both system with have a SSD as the hard disk, both firm moving away from the regular HDD. Planning on getting a PS5? Do not run out an get the biggest SSD you can find, why because not all SSD will be compatible, first the some M2 SSD will work with the PS5, but the list of compatible SSD with the port and architecture will be available only after the launch. Backward compatibility, again both side offer something on this, Microsoft stated that the Xbox Series X would be backward compatible to even some game of the original Xbox up to Xbox One. Sony said that the playstation would be backward compatible with some of the PS4 games, that they will run some test in the Beta phase and should be able to advise at launch, which title will be compatible, on this part for some there was a contradiction as it was said that if we had a large PS4 games library on an external HDD, we could play them from the external HDD or copy them over to the internal SSD. Honestly, if only a few games are compatible with this backward capability, why even bother to mention this.
GPU, it is interesting that both console will have an AMD GPU in them, so on that note they are pretty much equals, only a few teraflops of a difference in speed, which according to Sony, video is much and cant be based on teraflops only, guess you know who has the least.
The major innovation from each are quite different. Sony spent time, energy and money on the future and they are up with 3D sound also called the Tempest. Microsoft went a different route, what is very interesting for any gamers out there is this game pause and switch feature, allowing a user to pause a game a start a different one or pick up where you left one off.
In my personal opinion, currently on the gamer market, Microsoft is in the lead, they have already shown us, what the Xbox Series X will look like inside out, as for Sony they offered a theoretical description of what to expect, we have yet to see the controller of the console itself and we are about 8 months away from launch. Come on Sony, I need more than no loading wait time and instantaneous patch application to want this new console. Well looks like they found a different way to make us wait.