Sony PlayStation has now revealed the official specs of its upcoming PlayStation 5 next-generation console. This means that we now know the specs of both the Xbox Series X and the PlayStation 5, so we can compare those specs alongside each other. This isn’t a “this console is better than this console”, as we all know there’s more to a console then just hardware. Such as game selection, feature sets, and code optimization. But there’s no denying hardware is a big part.
Below you can see the table that places everything we know about the hardware specs of both consoles, below.
| Xbox Series X | PlayStation 5 |
|---|---|
| CPU: 8x Cores @ 3.8 GHz Custom Zen 2 CPU | CPU: 8x Cores @ 3.5GHz Custom Zen 2 CPU |
| GPU: 12.155 TFLOPS, 52 CUs @ 1.825 GHz Custom RDNA 2 | GPU: 10.28 TFLOPS, 36 CUs @ 2.23 GHz Custom RDNA 2 |
| Memory: 16 GB GDDR6, 320mb bus | Memory: 16 GB GDDR6, 256-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth: 10 GB @ 560 GB/s, 6GB @ 336 GB/s | Memory Bandwidth: 448GB/s |
| Internal Storage: 1 TB Custom NVME SSD | Internal Storage: 825GB Custom NVME SSD |
| I/O Throughput: 2.4 GB/s (Raw), 4.8 GB/s (Compressed) | I/O Throughput: 5.5GB/s (Raw), 8-9GB/s (Compressed) |
| Expandable Storage: 1 TB Custom SSD expansion card (Seagate) | Expandable Storage: NVMe SSD (still testing varies compatible SSDs) |
| External Storage: USB attached HDD Support | External Storage: USB attached HDD Support |
| Optical Drive: 4K UHD Blu-Ray drive | Optical Drive: 4K UHD Blu-Ray drive |
What can you take away from this chart? For the most part, both consoles are similar with slight differences. On paper, you can see that while the Xbox Series X does appear to have more availability power, it can’t be ignored that the PlayStation 5 does read I/O faster, 2x faster.
While this isn’t hardware-based, it’s worth mentioning that PlayStation 5 will not support hardware backward compatibility and will instead use software support. Similar to what Microsoft did for the Xbox One. At launch, the PlayStation 5 will support PlayStation 4 games, but only “Most” of the top 100 played games. With more games coming later on. There hasn’t been any mention of PlayStation 1-3 backward compatibility support.
There’s still so much more that we need to know about both of these powerhouse consoles. Microsoft and Sony aren’t done yet, as we’re still months away from the release of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, and I’m sure we haven’t seen everything that these companies are ready to announce.
