We heard last week about the PS5's total GPU teraflop performance, and how at 10.3 TFlops, it's behind the Xbox Series X's 12 TFlops. Sony said that it had other ways of offering leading performance, despite the difference in these numbers, but some new benchmarks suggest otherwise.
As pointed out by Notebook Check, benchmarks for AMD's Radeon RX 5000 line of graphics cards can give us an indication of how the two consoles might perform in real life. The RX 5000 cards, also known by their codename "Navi", use the same RDNA 2 architecture as the chips in both the new Xbox and new PlayStation, which is why they're a good comparison.
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It all comes down to clock speeds: the speed at which processors can deal with a list of instructions. First off, Sony itself has said that the PS5's performance output scales depending on usage. That means that while the Xbox, as far as we know, will deliver 1.8 GHz consistently, the PS5 may sometimes give less than its maximum 2.23 GHz speed.
Sony's key claim to ignoring the numeical gap between the PS5 and the Xbox Series X is that the PS5 GPU runs at a higher clock speed. Because 2.23 GHz is around 24% faster than 1.8GHz, it follows that the PS5 will perform at a 24% higher rate than expected — right?
Not from what Notebook Check has seen. Notebook Check claims that overclocked RX 5000 cards do not see as big of a jump in performance from the speed as you might expect. As an example, an RX 5700 XT card overclocked by 18% results in only 5 - 7% higher frame rates. The improvement is there, but it isn't linear, as Sony would have us believe.
The PS5 still has some potential advantages in the form of fast 3D audio, SSD storage and ray tracing, but the Xbox Series X has the latter two features as well, and it's debatable whether better visuals or better sound is more of a selling point to gamers. It's far too early to say for sure which console will win this generation's duel for supremacy, but the PS5's numbers aren't looking great so far.
