Sony's livestream today revealed the official specs for the PS5 and we can now crown a specs champion among the next-generation consoles: the Xbox Series X.
Now to be clear, there are some areas where the PS5 has the advantage, but based on what we know today, the Xbox Series X looks like the more powerful console.
- PS5: Specs, price, release date and how it compares to gaming laptops
- Xbox Series X: specs, price and how it compares to gaming laptops
- Xbox Series X specs revealed by Microsoft: Your move, PS5
| Row 0 - Cell 0 | Xbox Series X | PS5 |
| CPU | 8x Cores @ 3.8 GHz (3.66 GHz w/ SMT) Custom Zen 2 CPU | 8x Cores @ 3.5 GHz (variable frequency) |
| GPU | 12 TFLOPS, 52 CUs @ 1.825 GHz Custom RDNA 2 GPU | 10.3 TFLOPS, 36 CUs @ 2.33 GHz (variable frequency) |
| Memory | 16 GB GDDR6 / 320mb bus | 16 GB GDDR6 |
| Memory Bandwidth | 10GB @ 560 GB/s, 6GB @ 336 GB/s | 448 GB/s |
| Internal Storage | 1 TB Custom NVME SSE | 825 GB Custom NVME SSD |
| I/O Throughput | 2.4 GB/s (Raw), 4.8 GB/s (Compressed, with custom hardware decompression block) | 5.5 GB/s (Raw), up to 8-9GB/s (Compressed) |
As you can see from the chart, the Xbox Series X has an advantage in critical areas like the CPU and the GPU.
While both share similar architecture, the Xbox Series X has both a higher clock speed with its custom 8-cores AMD Zen 2 processor running at 3.8 GHz versus the 3.5 GHz of the comparable CPU in the PS5.
Moving to the GPU, the Xbox Series X is ahead with its custom RDNA 2 capable of 12 TFLOPS courtesy of its 52 CUs at 1.825GHz when compared to the custom RDNA 2 in the PS5 generating 10.28 TFLOPS with 36 CUs at 2.23 GHz.
The one area that the PS5 really stands out in is the SSD, which Sony understandably made a primary focus of its announcement. The PS5's oddly-sized (825GB) SSD can transfer data at 5.5 GB/s (raw) or 8-9 GB/s (compressed), which is 100x the speed of the PS4 and considerably faster than the Xbox Series X's 1TB SSD at 2.4 GB/s (raw) and 4.8 GB/s (compressed).
With all of that said, real-world performance doesn't always align perfectly with raw specs, so we are eager to get our hands-on both consoles and find out which console more effectively harnesses all of that power.
