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

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.

Games are built to run on a wide range of machines, but devs prioritise the hardware most of their audience has; it just makes logical sense to tailor to the most popular machine when designing your technology, since that's how the most amount of people will experience your game.

If you swapped the hardware of the two around, you'd probably still see games mostly run better on PS5.