Xbox boss says he felt ‘even better’ after seeing PS5 hardware specs

Xbox boss Phil Spencer says he felt “even better” about Xbox Series X after watching PlayStation’s recent PS5 hardware specs reveal.

The tech-heavy ‘Road to PS5’ video premiered earlier this month, featuring a detailed analysis of the PlayStation 5’s specs by architect Mark Cerny.

The video revealed that the PS5’s specs are slightly below Xbox Series X in terms of both CPU and GPU, however these on-paper numbers reportedly do not tell the full story.

Speaking to IGN in a video published on Wednesday, Spencer said he was impressed with the PS5’s audio and SSD technology, but added that he feels “really good” about how Xbox’s own next-gen hardware lines up against its rival.

Asked how he reacted to the PS5 specs reveal, Spencer said: “I felt really good, no doubt. I felt really good about how Series X lines up.

“I think Mark [Cerny] and the team did some really good work on the audio processing that they’ve talked about, their SSD technology is impressive – we like that and we saw the work that they did.”

He added: “The planning takes a long time and so I will definitely have respect for any platform team that’s launching… it just takes a lot of work. But I will say when we finally saw the public disclosure, I felt even better about the choices we made on our platform and I kind of expected that I would.

“The hardware team… that did Xbox One S, Xbox One X… I just have a lot of confidence in them, and if I give them the time and the targets to go hit, I just believe in their ability to create a great end-to-end program. The work that Jason Ronald and the team have done is just fantastic.”

Microsoft also released the full Xbox Series X hardware specifications this month, via VGC network partner Digital Foundry.

The next-gen console will feature an eight core CPU with 16 threads, allowing for 12.155 teraflops of compute power and “impressive” speeds of up to 3.8ghz when hyper-threading is disabled.

Series X will include a GPU capable of 12 teraflops of compute performance and a 1TB custom NVMe solid state drive.

In comparison, PS5’s CPU is said to be capable of speeds of up to 3.5ghz and a GPU that can push compute performances of 10.28 teraflops.

However these on-paper numbers do not tell the full story, as PS5 utilises variable frequencies – referred to as ‘boost’- which theoretically allow the console to hit GPU frequencies far higher than expected, with more compute power able to be extracted.

Digital Foundry editor Richard Leadbetter explained: “Sony‘s pitch is essentially this: a smaller GPU can be a more nimble, more agile GPU, the inference being that PS5’s graphics core should be able to deliver performance higher than you may expect from a TFLOPs number that doesn’t accurately encompass the capabilities of all parts of the GPU.”

The PS5’s high-bandwidth SSD has also been highlighted as one of its most important features, with the drive able to load 2GB of data in one quarter of a second.

Sony expects PS5 to be backwards compatible with the “overwhelming majority” of PS4 games in the future, although only with the top 100 or so when it launches during the 2020 holiday season.