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Forums - Microsoft - Xbox announces partnership with AMD for "next generation Xbox consoles"

Otter on 12 October 2025
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.

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.



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curl-6 on 12 October 2025
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.



Kyuu on 12 October 2025
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

Imaginedvl on 12 October 2025
Kyuu said:

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.

I think a lot of what you are saying makes sense. Esp. the fact that while the Series X is a bit more powerful on paper, it is not universally better in every aspect.

The bold part thought is weird to me :) Maybe I misunderstood you, but you are basically saying that for Microsoft to "close the gap" with whatever Sony will come out for the PS6, they have to spend more money to make the PU capable of doing the same thing? Are you assuming that Microsoft cannot simply use the same base as Sony, and if they put more money into it, it will simply be better? In short, you seem to believe that if Microsoft spends the same money as Sony on their hardware, it cannot be as good or better than whatever Sony will come out with. I find this weird :)

No fanboyism here, don't get me wrong. But if you look at it the other way around, Sony spent a truckload of money on the PS3, and in the end, it was the same scenario as with the Xbox Series X - PlayStation 5, just reversed. I just found your last statement equivalent to: "Whatever Sony does, if Microsoft wants to equal it, their solution needs to cost a hundred more"...

Last edited by Imaginedvl - on 12 October 2025

JRPGfan on 12 October 2025
Imaginedvl said:
Kyuu said:

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.

I think a lot of what you are saying makes sense. Esp. the fact that while the Series X is a bit more powerful on paper, it is not universally better in every aspect.

The bold part thought is weird to me :) Maybe I misunderstood you, but you are basically saying that for Microsoft to "close the gap" with whatever Sony will come out for the PS6, they have to spend more money to make the PU capable of doing the same thing? Are you assuming that Microsoft cannot simply use the same base as Sony, and if they put more money into it, it will simply be better? In short, you seem to believe that if Microsoft spends the same money as Sony on their hardware, it cannot be as good or better than whatever Sony will come out with. I find this weird :)

No fanboyism here, don't get me wrong. But if you look at it the other way around, Sony spent a truckload of money on the PS3, and in the end, it was the same scenario as with the Xbox Series X - PlayStation 5, just reversed. I just found your last statement equivalent to: "Whatever Sony does, if Microsoft wants to equal it, their solution needs to cost a hundred more"...

Sony is doing R&D with AMD,... potentially altering the direction AMD gpus in future take, all for the sake of the Playstation.

Meanwhile Sony is a hardware company, that excel at just that, making good hardware.
And honestly Xbox doesn't have anyone like Mark Cerny. 

Yes I trust Playstation to be better at min max'ing performance of hardware and hitting the sweetspot in terms of performance and price, and knowing what the future demands from game devs and studios are, and where hardware is going. Ei. not making mistakes or wasting costs on stuff that might not matter, design wise.

Xbox has MS behind them, and they have fantastic software engineers.
They have different strengths, as companies. 

I don't think its outlandish to believe that if Xbox spends the same amount of money on hardware, as sony's playstation that the results could be worse. I kinda expect that outcome tbh.  If it played out differently I would almost think of it as a "hat's off to you" moment (ei. well played, you did something unexpected).
There is also economics of scale at play here. Sony will likely have better relations with other hardware manufactures, and because of order sizes get cheaper prices pr units bought. These are not just easily overlooked details.


Sony learnt from the PS3.... they won't every f*** up like that again.

Like I expect sony to be better at hardware, because it plays to their strengths, and the "economics of scale" thing being in their favor.  Don't you?

Last edited by JRPGfan - on 12 October 2025

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SvennoJ on 12 October 2025
Imaginedvl said:

I think a lot of what you are saying makes sense. Esp. the fact that while the Series X is a bit more powerful on paper, it is not universally better in every aspect.

The bold part thought is weird to me :) Maybe I misunderstood you, but you are basically saying that for Microsoft to "close the gap" with whatever Sony will come out for the PS6, they have to spend more money to make the PU capable of doing the same thing? Are you assuming that Microsoft cannot simply use the same base as Sony, and if they put more money into it, it will simply be better? In short, you seem to believe that if Microsoft spends the same money as Sony on their hardware, it cannot be as good or better than whatever Sony will come out with. I find this weird :)

No fanboyism here, don't get me wrong. But if you look at it the other way around, Sony spent a truckload of money on the PS3, and in the end, it was the same scenario as with the Xbox Series X - PlayStation 5, just reversed. I just found your last statement equivalent to: "Whatever Sony does, if Microsoft wants to equal it, their solution needs to cost a hundred more"...

If the next XBox has dual boot or full Windows support, that's an extra cost. MS could eat that cost of course but the official MS site sells Windows 11 for $139.

Also economy of scale comes into effect and Sony can offset the price by recouping tarifs from other countries as they're probably doing now.


Maybe MS can license the PS6 HW, slap an XBox sticker and Windows 11 Home on it and sell it as an XBox PC ;)




JRPGfan on 12 October 2025
SvennoJ said:
Imaginedvl said:

I think a lot of what you are saying makes sense. Esp. the fact that while the Series X is a bit more powerful on paper, it is not universally better in every aspect.

The bold part thought is weird to me :) Maybe I misunderstood you, but you are basically saying that for Microsoft to "close the gap" with whatever Sony will come out for the PS6, they have to spend more money to make the PU capable of doing the same thing? Are you assuming that Microsoft cannot simply use the same base as Sony, and if they put more money into it, it will simply be better? In short, you seem to believe that if Microsoft spends the same money as Sony on their hardware, it cannot be as good or better than whatever Sony will come out with. I find this weird :)

No fanboyism here, don't get me wrong. But if you look at it the other way around, Sony spent a truckload of money on the PS3, and in the end, it was the same scenario as with the Xbox Series X - PlayStation 5, just reversed. I just found your last statement equivalent to: "Whatever Sony does, if Microsoft wants to equal it, their solution needs to cost a hundred more"...

If the next XBox has dual boot or full Windows support, that's an extra cost.
MS could eat that cost of course but the official MS site sells Windows 11 for $139.

Also economy of scale comes into effect and Sony can offset the price by recouping tarifs from other countries as they're probably doing now.


Maybe MS can license the PS6 HW, slap an XBox sticker and Windows 11 Home on it and sell it as an XBox PC ;)


I hadn't even thought of that part.
Their core business is selling Windows and products related to it. 
I'm sure OEM when they sell a PC give MS a small amount of $ for windows.

If your now doing PCs, and those sales take off, that's then millions of those small cuts they would normally get from OEM's they wont be getting.
(assuming people that buy a xbox pc, don't also invest in multiple other PCs afterwards, as that is part of the "value" aspects a Xbox PC would bring as a 2-in-1 device)



Kyuu on 12 October 2025
Imaginedvl said:
Kyuu said:

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.

I think a lot of what you are saying makes sense. Esp. the fact that while the Series X is a bit more powerful on paper, it is not universally better in every aspect.

The bold part thought is weird to me :) Maybe I misunderstood you, but you are basically saying that for Microsoft to "close the gap" with whatever Sony will come out for the PS6, they have to spend more money to make the PU capable of doing the same thing? Are you assuming that Microsoft cannot simply use the same base as Sony, and if they put more money into it, it will simply be better? In short, you seem to believe that if Microsoft spends the same money as Sony on their hardware, it cannot be as good or better than whatever Sony will come out with. I find this weird :)

No fanboyism here, don't get me wrong. But if you look at it the other way around, Sony spent a truckload of money on the PS3, and in the end, it was the same scenario as with the Xbox Series X - PlayStation 5, just reversed. I just found your last statement equivalent to: "Whatever Sony does, if Microsoft wants to equal it, their solution needs to cost a hundred more"...

No, what I meant was that the next Xbox being hundreds of dollars more expensive almost-guarantees that it will be superior by a decent margin, that no amount of "optimization" can put the PS6 ahead in any scenario. It would be hilarious if Xbox cost $300-$400 more than a PS6 and still end up not soundly outperforming it in the real world. PS3 was an embarrassment for the initial price (ignore backwards compatibility and its media player capabilities), but these are different times and neither Sony nor MS would dare doing some crazy Ken shit like 2006 Cell + Bluray lol.

But since you mentioned it... Yes, I do believe that Sony generally is better than Microsoft at making superior hardware for the production cost (not to be confused with retail price). PS3 was the exception and a bit of a disaster. Ken Kutaragi messed up big time. Microsoft never made money from Xbox hardware, not even from the expensive One X (suggesting high production costs), but they're apparently changing this by pricing their products really high.

Ironically though... If Trump's Tariff Tantrums (TTT) continue, and Microsoft doesn't tackle the problem like Sony or Nintendo, we might actually witness a situation where a $1000 would not be enough to guarantee more power than a $700 PS6. It's hard to say where we're going. 



Imaginedvl on 12 October 2025
SvennoJ said:
Imaginedvl said:

I think a lot of what you are saying makes sense. Esp. the fact that while the Series X is a bit more powerful on paper, it is not universally better in every aspect.

The bold part thought is weird to me :) Maybe I misunderstood you, but you are basically saying that for Microsoft to "close the gap" with whatever Sony will come out for the PS6, they have to spend more money to make the PU capable of doing the same thing? Are you assuming that Microsoft cannot simply use the same base as Sony, and if they put more money into it, it will simply be better? In short, you seem to believe that if Microsoft spends the same money as Sony on their hardware, it cannot be as good or better than whatever Sony will come out with. I find this weird :)

No fanboyism here, don't get me wrong. But if you look at it the other way around, Sony spent a truckload of money on the PS3, and in the end, it was the same scenario as with the Xbox Series X - PlayStation 5, just reversed. I just found your last statement equivalent to: "Whatever Sony does, if Microsoft wants to equal it, their solution needs to cost a hundred more"...

If the next XBox has dual boot or full Windows support, that's an extra cost. MS could eat that cost of course but the official MS site sells Windows 11 for $139.

Also economy of scale comes into effect and Sony can offset the price by recouping tarifs from other countries as they're probably doing now.


Maybe MS can license the PS6 HW, slap an XBox sticker and Windows 11 Home on it and sell it as an XBox PC ;)


Yes, if it is a full fledge PC, capable of running Windows games, it will be way more expensive for sure. That's what it looks like based on all the rumors. But we'll never know we'll get there, they may still surprise us with "true" console for their next-gen hardware (I really hope not).



Kyuu on 13 October 2025

Kepler corroborated MLiD's comments on PS6/handheld/Xbox-next's specs. And he agrees with me on Xbox (Magnus) beating PS6 universally or near-universally this time:

"I don't see how PS6 can match Magnus, it has fewer CPU cores, lower CPU frequency, fewer CUs, fewer ROPs, lower GPU frequency, less cache and memory bandwidth. It's not a huge difference but Magnus should have better performance in 100% of games unlike this gen where it's more of a 50/50"

For PS6 to have an "optimization" edge, it needs to beat Xbox in important hardware areas.