By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
Kyuu on 12 October 2025
Edit Thread
curl-6 said:
Kyuu said:

Optimization is not a significant advantage for a lead platform when the architecture is near identical. Older consoles (PS3 and older) were radically different architecturally, so being a lead platform made pretty big differences. This is no longer the case between Xbox and Playstation, where architectures are too similar and game engines are very scalable/flexible.

PS5 beats the Series X because it has quite a few advantages (even on paper). Depending on engines and how a game is designed, PS5 often produced better results because it's simply superior in some scenarios. It's the smallest gap between two consoles launching at the same time. PS5 was wildly underestimated before launch by TFLOPS lunatics.

Xbox's next highend hardware (I suspect they will have a range) seems to comfortably beat the PS6 in all regards (gap seems larger than PS5 vs Series X, but possibly smaller than PS4 Pro vs One X), so unless PS6 has a game changing feature, optimization should not really help it close the gap in 99% of cases. But then again, if the next Xbox is indeed just a fixed PC and goes to sell anysmal numbers by console standards, optimization may return to being a relevant Sony advantage.

Games are designed around leveraging those PS5 strengths as its the lead platform, less so Series X because devs have limited time to optimize and a platform that comprises say 50% of your audience will get more effort than one that is only say 20% of your audience. PS5 also apparently has a more efficient API.

In terms of sheer compute throughput though, Series X is the superior piece of hardware.

Developers don't optimize their games fully to any platform these days. They develop with the intent of supporting as many hardware as possible. When PS5 shows an advantage, it's more often due to the game simply being more suitable to aspects that PS5 excells at. Most games aren't being designed around PS5 specifically. They're designed with a wide hardware range (including nVidia PC GPU's) in mind.

PS5's popularity advantage helps, but not every case where it beats Xbox Series X is just because it's the lead platform (what even is a lead platform anymore?) It's more accurate to say that "PS5 was designed around what developers wanted" than to say "Developers design around what the PS5 is".

Regardless, my main point was that optimization isn't going to put PS6 ahead of the next Xbox if the latter beats it at every metric. PS6 will need to be similar to PS5 and answer with a number of hardware advantages of its own, preferably stuff that developers are asking for. After all, Cerny didn't panic at Series X and "boostclocked" the PS5 at the last second out of desperation lol.