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Kyuu on 12 October 2025
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Otter said:
Kyuu said:

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.

It really does depend on the game, there are clearly cases where the Xbox port was phoned in... See FFXVI lol 

And if developers can built functionality around the Dual sense, that is clearly a reflection of dedicated mam hours poured uniquely into to the playstation platform. In the early days one of obvious reasons for PS5 leading performance wise was Xbox actually boasting higher res but being less able to maintain it's frame rate, that is an optimisation issue. In other cases you have complete oversight with bugs and other issues in Xbox versions with certain settings not working,, sometimes post-production welding blurrier pictures etc. This sometimes also effects the playstation version whilst sparring the Xbox but Curl is right in that optimisation still very much plays a role in quality outcomes, alongside your point as well.

This isn't what I meant by optimization. A Series X game having lower fps due to higher resolution still means the game is optimized in the sense that Xbox's power is being expressed in some form. But overall, Xbox's significant advantage per "specs on paper" isn't being materialized in games, and the reason is people weren't reading the entire specs sheet, just the factors they deemed more important.

When Cerny explained PS5's design before launch, Digital Foundry challenged his claim that "faster GPU is superior to wider in key areas". DF made a comparison between two old GPU's with the same TLOPS figure, one of them was wide and slow, the other narrow and fast. They argued that wider was superior even when TFLOPS are equalized (though to be fair, they added a disclaimer that future tech like RDNA2 could play out differently). PS5 was thought to be an "a narrow 8~ TFLOPS machine boostclocked to 10.2". Significantly lower than Xbox's "wide 12.1 TFLOPS", and this is before factoring in the CPU and bandwidth differences.

It turns out that Xbox Series X had 3 problems: Low GPU clockrate, split RAM bandwidth speeds, and apparently a poorer API. Series X probably cost quite a bit more than PS5 to manufacture, and yet it wasn't universally better in every aspect. When PS5 came out, it was often described as "pushing above its weight". There is no such thing as pushing above its weight... people just overlooked its advantages or Series X's potential bottlenecks. Technology evolves and these theoretical figures don't tell us much.

The next top of the line Xbox will potentially cost hundreds of dollars more to manufacture and sell than a launch PS6. This should enable Microsoft to not give the PS6 any major hardware advantages that close the gap. I don't think optimization will do anything in this scenario.

Last edited by Kyuu - on 12 October 2025