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Comment by guidedlight | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this is why Xbox Series X never achieved a noticeable performance advantage over PlayStation 5, despite having more capable hardware.

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The Xbox runs on a custom OS derived from Windows Core. Not the same as a consumer version of Windows.

[Edit] The answer you’re probably looking for is I/O. The PS5 is much faster than the Series X in terms of getting stuff off disk and actually using it. That more than compensates for the small speed advantage the Series X has.

> derived from Windows Core

if you polish a turd, it's still a turd.

The kernel is fine, it's all that crap they keep shoving into userspace that's the issue.

I consider that the core of Windows (the NT kernel and win32 api) is actually a very polished gem but it is encased in layers of upon layers of barely polished turds ( winui, the win11 shell, the over agressive telemetry, forced ms635 integration, etc..)

Makes sense, given that allegedly Windows NT is very much next gen OpenVMS... https://www.itprotoday.com/server-virtualization/windows-nt-...

The kernel might be a polished gem but win32 API?

Practical is a term I'd use as win32 has managed to survive to this day but that came with a boatload of hacks and problems. It's ugly.

When you run Steam games on Linux that mostly goes via a version of Wine, which implements win32.

Yes, win32 is ugly, and so is x86.

I also heard that the PlayStation 5 graphics API's are more optimized to the hardware than DirectX is. Not sure if that's true though.

I've heard that too. And also Xbox had 2 different DirectX APIs, one more customised to the console, and one that's the standard Windows DirectX which is not as performant. From what I've heard most devs used the latter as it made porting the PC version of the game easier, and sales on Xbox would be tiny compared to PlayStation (1/3rd the install base, sales even less than that due to Xbox users not buying games and just using gamepass) there was less incentive to optimise.

That is quite common in all consoles.

Playstation has LibGNM and LibGNMX, Switch has OpenGL and Vulkan but you really want NVN for every drop of performance

This was always the case. Ps3 was supposedly more powerful but devs didn’t care to make use of it and just port and move on to the next project. Only nintendo hardware seemed to get special treatment with game design probably because it was like a generation behind in power.

No it's just slowed down by windows bloat. Weaker and mobile devices suffer the most due to aggressive power saving.

I was so excited for the Series X and it's just another crap-tier wannabe gaming PC, with none of the flexibility. It makes me so sad how miserable the XBox has become. I fucking LOVED the 360 back in the day, I used to run home from school to get on Halo 3 and play with friends.

And granted, those same friends and I still play Halo Infinite, but we're all on PCs. Nobody bothers with the goddamn XBox.

The Xbox died the moment they announced it would require a constant connection to the Kinect, and internet in order to function. Even after backtracking from that, it never recovered. There’s also just a lack of reason for it to exist anymore. The PlayStation fills the need for a high power console, Nintendo offers something portable and gimmicky, what would Xbox even offer here?

These days most consoles run fairly standard hardware and games are programmed to be generic and published on every console.

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