With PS5 and Xbox Series X, Sony and Microsoft maintained exactly the same base and exactly the same approach that we have seen on PS4 and Xbox One, but the strategy of the two companies in this new generation it was very different, and in the end the production inconveniences, and the shortage of consoles, have ended weighing down a transition period which, under normal conditions, should now be very close to closing.

Today, with that practically a year and a half of context on the table, we have the opportunity to appreciate the work that Sony and Microsoft did with PS5 and Xbox Series X, how the ecosystem of the two consoles has evolved and choose if, in the end, these were or were not up to the situation. Personally, I think that not only have they failed to meet expectations, but deep down they were quite low what was supposed.

It is a topic that we deal with in other products, but in the end it is not at all difficult to argue. It is enough to bring up that PS5 and Xbox Series X they are not systems capable of working perfectly with native resolutions in 4K and 60 FPS fixed, while still resorting to upscaling or active resolution, and that ray tracing is something that they are too big.

I don't want to repeat myself on issues that we covered, but all of this information that we saw is that it is required to have the context that we need to investigate five things that Sony and Microsoft did wrong with PS5 and Xbox Series X. This is not supported by an opinion, but rather in truth that we saw throughout that nearly year and a half that the two consoles have been on the market, and also in the five drawbacks that we have seen in the article.

1.-Using an APU on PS5 and Xbox Series X was a mistake

It's becoming increasingly clear to me that the change caused by going from PS3 and Xbox 360 to PS4 and Xbox One was a serious mistake. I refer to the abandonment of a design with Distinguished central processing unit and GPU in separate packages to an APU, a solution that integrates the central processing unit and the GPU in a single package, and I'll explain why.

Employ a semi-custom APU makes design easy of new consoles, and can also help reduce costs, that does not accept any discussion and is something positive. However, when integrating CPU and GPU in exactly the same package, fundamental restrictions come into play:

• the two elements must communicate space at the silicon level, which means that in order to fit a central processing unit and a GPU in the same package, essential elements have to be cut. This causes them to lose performance and essential specifications, to the point that, without going further, the PS5's Zen 2 central processing unit only has 8 MB of L3, and its RDNA2 GPU comes without unlimited cache.
• in addition distribute the free TDP, something that our Sony explained throughout the official presentation of PS5, at the time it mentioned that the continuity of the GPU of that console can reach 2.29 GHz of maximum continuity, but that it is active and that it is adjusted depending on the workload, and that it can be reduced if the central processing unit has a greater weight.

As I said at the beginning of this chapter Xbox 360 and PS3 had a very different design, in which both the central processing unit and the GPU were integrated in completely different packages, which allowed to overcome those 2 essential restrictions to which we referred. So much so that the two consoles had GPUs that, at the time, were among the most cutting-edge currently, something that did not happen with PS5 and Xbox Series X.

2.-Recourse to architectures that are on the planet of the PC

Don't get me wrong, the architectures out there on the PC planet don't have any drawbacks, but they are designed to be incorporated with a fashion aspect, and nurturing skills, that are not likely on a game console. On the other hand, employing those architectures prevents consoles from achieving have superior technologies or items to those who are in the PC field at each and every precise moment.

Think, for example, of the PS3 and its Cell central processing unit, the XDR memory of that console, or in the Xbox 360 GPU, which used an early architecture of unified shaders in the middle of 2005. It was shocking in the fact that both consoles had much more advanced elements than the PCs of the season. This left the programmers to find essential advances as they learned to exploit the real potential of those consoles, and also had a positive bump in its useful history. You just have to meditate, for example, on the quality of the latest games that PS3 and Xbox 360 have received.

PS5 and Xbox Series X use architectures on the planet of the PC, which means that truly they do not contribute anything revolutionary. That differential value ended with PS4 and Xbox One, and the same has happened with the new generation of consoles. RDNA2 architecture and ray tracing? Hardware-accelerated ray tracing came to the PC in 2018, and cheap 8-core, 16-thread processors have been a thing since 2017.

The same goes for SSD entities and 4K resolution. The GTX 780 Ti from 2013 could now run games in 4K, and in the end we are left with a landscape that it doesn't represent any real progress over PCs from several years ago. If we add to this what we have said in the first point, those restrictions derived from using an APU, we are going to realize that PS3 and Xbox 360 marked "the culmination" of the term console, and that from there we have gone "hard below".

3.-Associate ray tracing to PS5 and Xbox Series X

In a strict sense, PS5 and Xbox Series X have dedicated hardware to accelerate ray tracing, but they do not have the possibility of working with this technology in a truly perfect way. The primary reason is in the very restrictions that the architecture shows that the GPUs of the two consoles use, and that they are also present in the Radeon RX 6000, based on the RDNA 2 architecture.

Ray tracing acceleration is accomplished by the applied cores being distributed on a ratio of one core to each compute unit. Thus, PS5 and Xbox Series X they have a combined 36 and 52 ray tracing cores, respectively. The drawback is that all those ray tracing cores show some essential flaws that make them not up to the level of the RT cores present in the GeForce RTX 20:

• Each core for ray tracing share elements with texturing entities, which means that they do not have the possibility of working simultaneously.
• Ray tracing kernels work with ray-triangle intersections and box bounding. It is true that these are the much more intensive and the ones that consume much more elements, but the BVH cross intersections, which are one step before those, are done in the shaders, which means that these are not left completely free of ray tracing.
• Finally, they are useless to work asynchronously (independent of shaders), which can cause a bottleneck at several levels.

If we add to this that the PS5 and Xbox Series X GPUs do not have unlimited cache, we offer ourselves an account of the inconvenience that we have on our hands, and it is very simple to understand that programmers have had to limit the implementation of ray tracing in games for both consoles.

I could give several examples, but in the end the titles that best prove that ray tracing is great for PS5 and Xbox Series X are Dying Light 2, which runs in 1080p and 30 FPS on both consoles with ray tracing capped on shadows and ambient occlusion, and Cyberpunk 2077, which also scrolls in 1080p and at 30 FPS with ray tracing capped on shadows and ambient occlusion in the same way.

4.-Talk about performance scenarios that they do not have the capacity to achieve

It is not the first time that Sony and Microsoft have exaggerated the abilities of the consoles of a specific generation, but with PS5 and Xbox Series X the situation has risen to heights that bordered on the absurd. Remember, to serve as an example, at the time PS5 was described as an 8K console, a resolution that is not a strong RTX 3090 is with the ability to scroll comfortably, or at the time it was stated that the Xbox Series X GPU was going to be at the level of an RTX 2080 Ti.

This type of action represents an essential drawback due to the fact that, in the end, They develop some hopes among the players who do not go to fulfill, and this isn't going to do much more than produce roughly deep fraud. In the end, PS5 and Xbox Series X are consoles that do not feel really comfortable doing work with 4K resolutions and very high qualities, since they usually do not reach 60 FPS unless they pull upscaling or active resolution.

Again, I could give several examples, but I am going to select one of the most popular titles currently, and one of the worst optimized on PC to better illustrate this drawback, Elden Ring. Said game runs in 4K and at 30 FPS on PS5 and Xbox Series X, a level that equivalent to a PC with a 6 GB RTX 2060 with the game set to the limit.

We are not knowing ray tracing here because now we dedicate a section to it without dependency, but it would be interesting to see how the performance of PS5 and Xbox Series X evolves at the time it is generated the transition to the graphics engine Unreal Engine 5 and intergenerational developments are abandoned. It gives me that we will take a surprise, and not for good.

5.-Use only 16 GB of unified memory

Memory represents an essential section of any system. Xbox 360 had an essential virtue in front of PS3, and it happens that that used a total of 512 MB unified, while PS3 had 2 blocks of 256 MB distinguished, one free XDR type for the central processing unit and another free GDDR3 type for the GPU. This rigorous division complicated the work of programmers, and was the trigger for the jump to a unified architecture.

Having a single block of unified memory has an essential virtue, and it happens that programmers they have the possibility to distribute the free memory as they deem favorable. In this way, a precise game may require a greater proportion of memory allocated to data for the central processing unit, which would be the work of RAM memory in a PC, while another may require much more memory allocated to textures and other elements used by the GPU, what we know as graphics memory or VRAM in the PC world.

A PC that has 8 GB of RAM and 8 GB of VRAM memory It will be less malleable than a console that has 16 GB of unified memory, due to the fact that it will be able to work as both types of memory since there is no such strong division. However, we must not forget that, in the end, the proportion of free memory has a fundamental weight, and that this tends to be among the elements that begin to show the passage of time earlier.

PS4 and Xbox One had 8 GB of unified memory, but of that amount an essential section was reserved for the system, which meant that, in the end, the programmers only had about 5 GB of unified memory free to save any and all game data. This made it still possible to play on PCs with just 8 GB of RAM today, but it affected game development for video consoles and has greatly hampered innovation and the creation of much more complex games with much larger worlds.

With PS5 and Xbox Series X the proportion of free unified memory has increased to 16 GB, but a section of this is also reserved for the system, which means that in the end the programmers only have about 13.5 GB free, precisely. As a result, certain unique new-gen titles like Ghostwire: Tokyo now require 12GB of RAM on PC, but will that amount of memory be enough for the new-gen to age gracefully? Personally, I think not, and what happened with PS4 and PS4 Pro, and particularly with Xbox One and Xbox One X, are 2 precedents that strengthen my position.