- The PlayStation 5 is barely any slower than the Series X in practice, and is in fact faster in certain workloads: my predictions about this being another "One X versus PlayStation 4 Pro" situation are incorrect, at least so far.
- In pure rasterization terms, the Series X and PlayStation 5 are slightly slower than my RTX 2080.
- In ray-traced workloads, the Series X and PlayStation 5 are roughly equivalent to an RTX 2060 Super, with DLSS disabled on the latter. As predicted, Nvidia's dedicated "RT Core" silicon is substantially faster than RDNA2's brute-forced ray tracing approach.
- In ray-traced workloads with DLSS enabled, the RTX 2060 base model is materially faster than the Series X or PlayStation 5.
- In ray-traced workloads with DLSS enabled, something like the RTX 3080 leaves the Series X and PlayStation 5 absolutely in the dust, demonstrating a gulf-like performance advantage.
- The storage speed advantages of the new consoles has seemingly been overstated: loading screen times on a contemporary 3.5 GB/s PC NVMe SSD are roughly the same.
I can see this situation in two ways:
First Outlook
At the present time and given my mixed early impressions, I'm not seeing what the point of the Series X is, for those who can afford a Ryzen 3600 PC with even a base RTX 2060, and who plan to predominantly play triple-A games which support DLSS-- especially if this player enjoys ray-tracing. The Series X's price-to-performance advantage starts to slip away, especially when one considers all of the other things one can use a PC for, and considering PC components can routinely be found substantially on sale.
I'm also struggling to see what advantage the Series X has over the PlayStation 5, assuming results continue to show the two with materially identical performance: the PlayStation 5 has a much better user interface, an innovative controller, and a large stable of "next generation"-style games right from the get-go. Albeit, it also has early-doors issues with system reset-requiring update hanging, sadly reminiscent of Windows 10's Microsoft Store, and even outright bricking.
The only differentiator in the Series X's cap versus the PlayStation 5-- but not versus the PC-- is "Game Pass": and to be fair, getting an entire system's library of games "for free" with a paid-up membership is a pretty big deal. Then again, for people with patience, PlayStation 5 heavy hitters will undoubtedly be obtainable for cut-rate pries on eBay, some months after their releases.
The real winner in this outlook is the Series S: all of the graphical features of the Series X and PlayStation 5 just at a lower resolution, full "Game Pass" support, but at only 300 USD where the price-performance ratio competition with the PC makes more sense.
Second Outlook
These new video game systems are monsters: they will consistently run games at reconstructed 4K with HDR at sixty frames per second, and will even hit thirty frames per second at a reconstructed 4K with more-than-reasonable quality ray tracing in use. In some games, these systems can even approach-or-hit one hundred and twenty frames per second, at slightly lower quality settings, and with a little barely-noticeable dynamic resolution scaling.
At that point, what is the purpose of having more power? Something like an RTX 3080 is such overkill that in practical terms, sitting not three inches from the televison, while actually concentrating on playing a real game, one wouldn't even be able to tell any differences between its output and a Series X or PlayStation 5: it's capable of much more, but would one even notice?
On top of it, Sony has a huge stable of exclusive games, many of which are the among the best games of the past several years. Meanwhile, Microsoft is essentially giving away their and EA's entire libraries of games for a small monthly subscription fee. Not to mention, with a box dedicated to just playing video games, the annoying aspects of Windows 10 can be avoided completely-- especially useful for a full-time GNU/Linux user such as myself.