Power vs. Speed: The Xbox Series X And PS5 are different animals | Hacker News Reader

Power vs. Speed: The Xbox Series X And PS5 are different animals

forbes.com

18 pointslawrenceyan23 comments

Polaris and Vega were ROP-limited, and performed worse than nvidia cards with similar tflop measurements.

The Xbox has a higher tflops rating because of more compute units, but it has the same number of raster units. Because the PS5 clocks higher, its ROP throughput will be greater. In a rendering workload like games this will make a difference. Whether or not this offsets the fewer compute units remains to be seen, but I’d wager the consoles are going to come out pretty much on par. There’s not going to be a big discrepancy like PS4 and Xbone.

I’m not too familiar with AMD/XSX architecture, but why wouldn’t ROP scale with number of GPU cores? Why would MS design something with lower ROP/core? Also, where did you get these details from?

ROPs are only useful for pushing pixel out, if you intended to use a large enough portion of the GPU for compute you don’t need as many ROPs.

Since compute shaders can write out directly into memory you don’t need to use the ROPs to write the result into a buffer / texture like in the early days of GPGPU.

If you assume 20-30% or even more of your frame GPU budget is spent on compute you can reduce the number of ROPs to match.

Unless you have other bottlenecks you really only need as many ROPs as the fill rate you’ll be targeting which will be dependent on the resolution and targeted frame rate.

10-15 years ago ROPs and TMUs scaled 1:1 with GPU “power” the more you moved the load into shaders and then compute the less meaningful those figures are.

You're missing one of the key pieces: software. I don't think many would argue that Sony can produce better tooling and operating system efficiency than Microsoft.

Even with identical hardware, I'd place my money on a small Xbox edge.

The PS3 was on paper significantly more powerful than the Xbox 360, however it didn't result in significantly better performance or graphics. In some games in some cases yes, in others not really.

Doesn't Sony use clang? My understanding was LLVM does a better job at optimisation than MSVC.

Whether the texturing/antialiasing units (called ROP in this GPU) are a bottleneck depends on the program you run on the GPU, and how it's tuned to the underlying fixed console hardware, and what tradeoffs are made to do work on the ROPs vs other hardware. With consoles the benefit of the fixed hardware configuration is that you can tune the program so that it's using the hw in a balanced way.

I'm failing to see how power and speed differ in a computing context.

CPU wise PS4 is weaker and slower, no matter how you frame it. Maybe on the GPU side you could make an argument for that difference, but still.

Either way, seems like a strong move forward for gaming.

Well the article explains what they mean by power and speed. The PS5's novel approach to storage will drive high quality real time texture streaming to games.

There's a couple of things in the article. The Xbox has a faster CPU, but the PS5 has a faster SSD. The Xbox has more GPU cores, but the GPU cores of the PS5 are faster. I would say number of cores versus speed equals how power and speed differ.

It's a silly artificial dichotomy they made up so they could have a catchy headline. They do define it, as CPU/GPU vs SSD, but it's a fairly contrived way of framing the two consoles.

I haven't bought a console since the Wii. With xbox vs Playstation battles, do people often switch consoles, have both or stick to their favorite? It almost seems similar to iOS vs Android in some ways.

not really. Microsoft screwed the pooch this generation with Xbox One but in the previous generation most console gamers had both the 360 and PS3.

Most console gamers now probably have a Switch and a PS4 in this generation.

It's all about the exclusives, regardless of what outsiders like to think about gamers. If you play a wide variety of games, you are more likely to have a PS4 though. They just have a bigger slate of exclusives.

I hear PS4 outsold Xbox One by a mile but it's strange because I only know people who either have the Xbox One or both. I don't know anyone who has just a PS4.

I know it's a small sample size, and not representative it's just a interesting.

I personally have both, and I prefer the Xbox One. We actually have two so I can game with my wife. The UI feels less like a toy, setting up groups and games is still much easier with Xbox Live than anything PlayStation has ever offered.

maybe it's a regional thing? everyone I know has a ps4 and I only know one or two people with an xbox

Historically it wasn't uncommon to switch, but there was also not much continuity between generations. You would keep your account and friends list, but would be restarting your library from scratch on a new console.

Both Microsoft and Sony are pushing for backwards compatibility which will give users a strong incentive not to switch since they can maintain a large part of their library.

Has anyone figured out if these new consoles will run games at 120/144Hz refresh rates?

I'm thinking of going back to console after years of PC (mostly due to space constraints and not having time to mess with fancy builds again) but 60 Hz is the single biggest deal breaker for me. Switching to a lower refresh rate even for a few minutes now gives me a headache

Not sure if they support running games at those refresh rates, but either way there won't be many if any AAA games that would actually be running +60 FPS. If we can even get stable 60 FPS for most titles with 1440p or 4K, I'll be surprised.

In the end it's still the graphics what sells and not the FPS for most people and definitely for most people buying game consoles. In the current gen, lot of games are still running 1080p@30FPS: https://www.ign.com/wikis/xbox-one/PS4_vs._Xbox_One_Native_R...

Xbox Series X has confirmed 120Hz: https://blurbusters.com/microsoft-reveals-xbox-series-x-with...

PS5 too: https://www.laptopmag.com/news/ps5-specs-price-vs-gaming-lap...

Please clarify for me. In this context is 60 Hz a "lower refresh rate"?

Clickbait article, they are very similar. On PC the CPU was hardly ever the bottleneck so I expect not much from the options MS is offering there.

We have GPUs becuse of the CPU bottleneck, it's been a very big thing.

That's just nitpicking. Just because something is turing complete doesn't mean it is optimized for a specific task. The responsibility of processing graphics has been shifted away from the CPU for a long time already.

I think you are working with an oversimplified model of graphics programming if you think graphics code runs just on the GPU.

But even in this ideal scenario, there would already big sacrifices involved in just offloading this stuff to GPUs: Sacrifices in SW complexity and development time moving from programmer-friendly CPU code to hard-to-program GPU interfaces.

The reality is in fact a CPU+GPU juggling setup where interacting CPU and GPU computations must be carefully coordinated and performance-tuned.

If the CPU bottleneck didn't exist and we could do without today's GPUs, we could make better graphics applications (games) given the same investment and technical engineering competence, and game developer life would be much more pleasant.

(There's an alternate history of more programmer friendly GPUs of course too, see eg the Larrabee story)

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