the beginning of the magazine, where the articles are small10 MAXIMUM PC MAY 2020 maximumpc.com
quickstart
And we have the technical specifications to start it
Console War Beckons
an AMD GPU—some tinkering
has been done. It also has
hardware ray tracing. Memory
is 16GB of GDDR6; with an
825GB SSD. PCIe 4.0 and other
trickery push the storage
bandwidth to 5.5GB/s, about
twice the Xbox’s 2.4GB/s.
Sony has taken a different
approach to boost. While the
Xbox is locked to two speeds,
the PS5 is more flexible,
depending on load and
temperature. Sony has made
use of AMD’s work on adaptive
voltages and frequencies it
developed for mobile chips,
and claims that having fewer
compute units in the GPU,
but running faster, is more
efficient. The PS5 manages
10.3 teraflops of number
crunching. The PS5 also has
a intriguing 3D audio chip—
it uses HRTF profiles (Head
Related Transfer Function) to
give the illusion that sounds
are coming from all around.
Initially, this is limited to
headphones, but it is hoped
to expand this to cover all
speakers. Both machines
have 4K UHD Blu-ray drives,
probably the last time we’ll
see optical drives on a console.
These machines are, in
essence, PC gaming rigs incustom boxes. Originally,
consoles borrowed hardware
from arcade games. 1999’s
Sega Dreamcast, changed
all that, using standard
PC chips. The original Xbox
used a Pentium III, although
hardly super-speedy, even
by the standards of the day.
Since then, every generation
of console has moved
closer to PC standards, and
moved upmarket. These two
equate to the top part of the
mid-range—pretty tasty.
Both manufacturers are
keen to point out that their
consoles will offer backward
compatibility. The Xbox
Series X will run Xbox One
games directly, plus Xbox
and Xbox 360 games under
emulation. The PlayStation 5
will play PS4 and PS4 Pro
games in “legacy mode.”
The new consoles will be
available for the holidays,
which generally equates to
November, but prices are yet
to be confirmed. The previous
generation was $399 for thePS4, and $499 for the Xbox; that
hundred bucks difference did
Sony a lot of good at the time.
That was seven years ago, and
both machines are carrying
a lot of expensive silicon. The
PS5 looks likely to be $499; the
Xbox won’t be much different.
Either manufacturer might
try to undercut the other, but
margins are going to be too
tight for much maneuvering.
Posturing on who has
the best hardware is not the
issue—it’s too close to call.
Who has the best games is
more relevant. Even that’s
a tough one; porting a PC
game to either system is
relatively easy. This leaves
us with exclusive games and
the quality of online gaming.
It looks as if we have two
evenly matched contenders. At
least this will sharpen up the
competition, and leave Sony
and Microsoft scrabbling for
something to give them the
edge. Which is good news for
us—decent hardware and a
keen rivalry. –CLMICROSOFT AND SONY have been
tantalizing us with snippets
about their new consoles for
months, and now we have
the rough technical specs.
Microsoft’s Xbox Series X
has custom AMD silicon
comprising of an eight-core
Zen 2 processor running at
3.8GHz; it has multithreading,
but enabling this will drop the
clock to 3.6GHz. Graphics are
supplied by an RDNA 2 chip
with 52 compute units (3,
cores), running at 1,825MHz,
complete with hardware ray
tracing. Microsoft boasts
of 12 teraflops of graphical
processing power on tap.
In theory, the new Xbox has
about four times the muscle
of an Xbox One S. You also get
16GB of GDDR6, 10GB of which
is reserved for the GPU, and
2.5GB for the OS. Storage is a
custom 1TB SSD. The target is
4K at 60fps, but it can go well
beyond that, to 8K and 120fps.
Sony’s PlayStation 5 follows
a similar pattern. Again, it’s an
eight-core, 16-thread Zen 2,
clocked at a maximum of
3.5GHz with multithreading
enabled. The graphics are
supplied by an RDNA 2 GPU
with 36 compute units, clocked
at 2,230MHz. This is high forThese machines are, in
essence, PC gaming rigs
in custom boxes.
Microsoft has gone
for a block monolith
look, bordering
on dull.©^MI
CROSOFT