There's also just the fact that Sony invests way, waaaay more than Microsoft in terms of pushing their hardware to the limit and trying to squeeze out every last drop of graphical performance.

Since the PS3 days Sony has made a point of hiring some of the best engineers in the business and giving them vast resources to creates games as good looking as possible, something MS just doesn't do to anywhere near the same extent.

You misinterpreted my statements.
The PS5 GPU is faster than the Series X in terms of clockrates.
But the PS5 GPU is slower overall.

There ARE parts of the PS5 GPU that because they operate at a higher clockrate, will have more throughput than the Series X.. For example Mpixel fillrate... Which is a function of ROPS multiplied by Clockspeed. (Both consoles have the same ROP count)
So in ROP bound scenarios: Think Anti-Aliasing, depth and stencil tests, alpha blending... Etc' the PS5 is faster as those 64 ROP units run at a higher clockspeed than Series X.

However another advantage for Sony is that... Sony's GPU is cheaper to manufacturer as it's a much smaller chip, so Sony can get more working chips per wafer.

And the difference between the GPU's in the real world are going to be inconsequential anyway which the games have empirically proven, it's more or less down to developer effort and competence at this point, rather than the hardware itself.

Hopefully that clears that up for you.

In the end, Microsoft having a faster console doesn't mean anything, because they aren't using it to it's fullest extent anyway.

Nah. Microsoft is using hardware that is console-equivalent for streaming, otherwise they might as well just use Threadripper paired up with Instinct for better throughput that any console and just use abstraction and virtualization, the hardware already exists for rack servers efficiently.

MLID is a hack job and gets a ton of crap... Wrong.

The Series X is factually faster than the PS5. Anyone who claims otherwise is just lying to themselves... Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 is built using very similar technology, the Xbox Series is just a larger chip, it's all there is to it.

Yes there are quirks like the split speed memory pools, slower ROP's, but the CPU doesn't have quirks like the PS5 has, so it's neither here nor there on that front.

I'm not ignoring Series X's advantages lol how on earth did you conclude this? I'm saying optimization only matters when the more popular console has meaningful advantages. PS4's popularity over One X didn't help it do anything, because the One X had no significant disadvantages vs PS4 Pro. I believe the only thing PS4 Pro had going for it was checkerboard acceleration, but that was nowhere near enough to match the One X in like 99% of relevant scenarios.

No, I didn't misinterpret you. You misinterpreted me! I was referring to clockrates as well, otherwise TFLOPS (flawed as it is) is the better metric for "total speed" when comparing two systems based on the same architecture. I assure you that everyone here knows full well that Series X is faster "overall".

The short of it that optimization makes use of existing advantages. If the popular console has no existing advantages, and the two consoles are based on the same architecture, then optimization would not do much.

FF16 is an outlier optimized more for PS5 than any typical multiplatform game. Hence it's so much better on Playstation compared to the average multiplat where PS5 and Series X trade blows, with Xbox typically winning. There were even a couple of 1st party Microsoft games that performed better on PS5 when they got ported, even though the devs had no PS experience and their late ports were never going to sell better on PS5. Not every game performed better on PS5 is just because it's the more popular platform. There are other reasons to this.

The Touryst is a game that appeared on Xbox before Playstation (seems like the devs prioritized the less popular console!). The PS5 version was rendered in native 8K, far above Series X's 6K. But since PS5 couldn't output 8K, the advantage was almost meaningless, and the devs only did it because it was cool to exploit PS5's quirks. This had nothing to do with popularity, just curious devs pushing an impressive console to its limit. They couldn't achieve it on Series X, because its disadvantages outweighed its advantage in this instance.

If Magnus has no disadvantages vs PS6, games should look and/or run better on it regardless of popularity. If it does have a number of notable disadvantages, then we might see similar results to what happened this generation.

There are actually a number of games that perform better on PS4 Pro than Xbox One X, exactly because the former had a much bigger install base so it got more attention from developers, despite being weaker hardware.

There are also games that "perform better" on the less popular AND less powerful console. This is especially true on older consoles with major architectural differences. But this doesn't apply to the vast majority of games.

Still I'm curious what games you're referring to. I remember there was like 1 or 2. Can you name them?

If they "perform better" because the One X resolution is much higher, then that wouldn't necessarily be an issue of optimization. All it means resolution was "over-prioritized" on Xbox.

Off the top of my head, Ace Combat 7 and Black Ops 6 run worse on the X without a visual advantage, despite the X being objectively stronger hardware.

Thanks for sharing. Checked DF's videos on both. Curious cases, but obvious outliers. DF suspects Ace Combat 7's superior performance on PS4 Pro may be the result of the extra optimization to get it to run smoothly enough on PSVR. Black Ops 6 primarily targets current gen consoles, and is an obvious outlier to other COD games which do play better on powerful Xbox consoles.

In an industry with hundreds of games released annually, there will always be a bunch of outliers. There's nothing revelatory about this.

PS5 trading blows with Series X is the norm. Both have meaningful advantages over the other, and the Series X does generally have the upper hand when resolution is factored in.

Magnus will not quite "100%" play all games better mind you, but the vast majority of them should (ignoring the likely stutters, since it's a PC) if the reported specs are accurate and no secret sauces are involved. Time will tell.

Let's not forget Street Fighter 6 is better on the Switch 2 than on Series S. Not just better in one area or another like in other ports, better overall.

Tflops is bullshit. It doesn't account for pixel or texel fillrate, it doesn't account for geometry throughput, it doesn't account for memory bandwidth, it doesn't take into account cache, it doesn't tell us anything about Ray Tracing performance or A.I. TOPs... It says nothing about integer or bfloat capabilities, it doesn't let us know about compression efficiency, culling capabilities and more.
You can have a GPU with less Teraflops beat a GPU with more Teraflops when it comes time to render a game.

It was always bullshit. Those who argue otherwise just prove they don't know what they are talking about when it comes to graphics hardware, it's really that simple... For the past few generations, console hardware manufacturers were using it for advertising purposes without any real context to it's implications... And sadly, people clung to that and tried to push certain narratives without any real understanding of what FLOPS actually is and what it means.

As for your lie that the PS5 is more optimized for FP16 math over the Series X... The Series X also supports rapid packed math and has 24.3Tflop of FP16 capability verses the PS5's 20.6Tflop.
The Xbox Series X has more shader pipelines, hence why it's FP32 and FP16 will always be ahead of the PS5's.

The PS5's strengths lay in streaming data from disk and fillrate, not compute.

Again... Any advantages on one console over another comes down to developer competence and resources, rather than the hardware itself, the Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 is literally cut from the same hardware cloth. (RDNA+Ryzen)

That's what I'm saying, that extra optimization makes a difference, as does the developer's priorities.