Xbox Series X is way more powerful than PS5 — here's how much more

If the reports are that the PS5 GPU and CPU are both variable rates then its likely those posted figures are best case and will likely throttle too (I'm sure if full boost performance was higher they'd have called it out). Its nice to see Xbox ahead this time just from the amount of grief Xbox One got on launch (yes I'd agree Sony has big a game advantage now but it wasn't like that early on). That being said whilst I'd have still gone Xbox if the positions had been reversed (ecosystem, PC, Gamepass) then glad to see the PS5 is good. There are plenty of Sony games I'd like to play and have been holding off till PS5 to get the best experience. Of course, how COVID-19 impacts my ability to purchase even one of them, let alone both is yet to be seen. Hope players on both sides and those of us who would like to buy both will still be in financial position to do so.

If you watched the "live" stream you'd have seen that Cerney said developers can basically choose which level of power they want out of the clocks. There are different benefits to doing it lower or higher. It's not like a laptop or a smartphone where the CPU and GPU will just throttle based off of heat. It's designed to maintain that boost state IF the game needs it. And all this talk about power really doesn't concern me because the best looking games of this CURRENT gen all are part of Sony's exclusive library. As powerful as the X is there is nothing on the Xbox that looks as good as god of war, or death stranding, or The Last of Us 2, or hell, even Uncharted 4. At the end of the day it's what the developers are able to ACTUALLY do with the hardware, not just the numbers behind it all.

Gears 5 and the Forza series would like a word. Also all the multiplat games look and play better on Xbox One X.

With the exception of what Rockstar puts out every like, 6 years or so, the third party multi platform titles are very often not even worth talking about, let alone trying to compare native 4K to checkerboard 4K which (when done correctly, I'm looking at you Nioh 2...) looks just as good. And sure, Gears 5 and Forza look alright, but if you're trying to sell me on a platform using a single decent arcade racer and a single decent but totally standard cover based shooter as your main selling points, then that platform has a problem that no number of teraflops can solve. And to further address your comment, those two titles can have as many words as they'd like. They STILL don't look as good as a single PS4 exclusive does. God of War, Detroit, TLOU2, Uncharted, Death Stranding, Spider-Man, hell The Order 1866 would ALL like a word with that statement. And that's just the ones I could think of off the top of my head. I'm sure I'm missing some...

That's entirely opinion. And plenty include Forza and Gears 5 right up there visually with any Naughty Dog game. Digital Foundry certainly said that about Gears 5. But at the same time Gears 5 ran dou ke the framerate of every one of those games you mention. All Sony games are 30fps. And yet Gears 5 got immense praise from Digital Foundry. They were surprised it still held the same visual fidelity of Sony games but at 60fps. And a mostly native 4K. Thry actually said is was technically the most impressive console game. As a whole. Horizon 4 also got an honorable mention in 2018 best graphics of the year by Digital Foundry. With only RDR 2, Spiderman and Battlefield 5 PC beating it. With RDR 2 winning out fight for console that year.

As far as I can see if someone wants to get on the console bandwagon now they are going with Xbox because the ecosystem like single purchase for PC and xbox, game pass, all Xbox one x titles are supported natively out of the box, and yes more powerful hardware at the core. I think this time MS don't really care about hardware specs they are banking on features like quick resume, faster load times, game pass which already includes xcloud, single purchase across windows and Xbox for newer titles(see recent titles launched) these are going to make a lot of difference. Remember this is the same approach apple makes to keep users lockdown into their own system and it works.

Windows Central. Please before ponytails go crazy, edit CPU and GPU and put "variable frequency". 10.28 and 2.28 is at boost and cannot exist at the same time due to thermal limitations. It's either one or the other no simultaneous and it's also BOOST. Cerny even said on average 10% performance reduction aka 9.28 TF

Yes, sorry, I'll add "variable" in right now. I forgot about that.

Now we know why Sony have been so so quiet. The system looks seriously imbalanced. And underpowered. Especially for Ray Tracing on top. A few tech people have been pointing out something extremely interesting. They say 10.28 Terra flops. If you look closely it says variable clock speed. MS made several. Points to Digital Foundry over and over that there clock speeds are fixed. They will not go lower. The tech experts are predicting that Sony in a panic have shown 10.28 Terra flops as the high end of its clock. Which won't be sustainable all the time. Just boost to 10.28 Terra flops occasionally to help with load. But will not sustain that load. Hence the point Sony mention Variable clock rate. Also we can confirm PS5 won't use SSD as ram. It doesn't have direct access to CPU. Which means game worlds won't be as big and expansive as Hellblade 2 trailer. Will wait for Digital Foundry to confirm. But it's vastly underpowered. Not just in the GPU. Also 825gb SSD internal. And people moaned about 1 tb in here for Xbox Series X. It seems MS really balanced there system to eliminate bottlenecks. Sony have literally used SSD for fast loading and storage. That's it.

None of it really matters when A) The quality of MS' exclusives has been, up to this point, so-so at BEST; and B) Whatever exclusives MS releases over the next couple years will continue to be held back by having to ALSO play on Xbox One hardware. So good luck actually taking advantage of all that fancy hardware when the software is still going to have to be functional when loading from a 6 year old 5400RPM mechanical drive.... You're gonna be getting high res 60fps Xbox One games for the initial part of this thing's life span. And for the third party titles, at the end of the day marketshare rules all. And there will likely continue to be a sales lead in Sony's favor. So those titles, too, won't be drastically different on the slightly more powerful series X.

Which corner of your ass are you pulling your game performance 'facts' from? Also, what does current games have to do with future unannounced titles from studios that were just acquired?

Well, I didn't think I stated any "facts", so explain what you actually dispute. And clearly, you don't pay much attention to the industry. MS has committed to having all of their first party titles, for some indeterminate amount of time, be playable on everything from an Xbox One S up to the most expensive Series X. Developers having to develop with that in mind will hamper what they can ultimately output, because at the end of the day, the game is gonna have to work even on the least powerful hardware. It's gonna be like modern PC gaming. No game takes full proper advantage of something like a 2080ti because no developer is targeting that level of hardware. They're targeting the much weaker console hardware because it HAS to work on everything. So yeah, they're not going to be able to take full advantage of all this fancy hardware. At least, not in the beginning.

I guess I should nt have said "facts" like I did, but you are stating something like it's 'a matter of fact'. So you don't believe thre could be patches or full add ons to existing games that allow older games to take advantage of newer features? Explain how PCs do it then. Weren't there games that came out before Ray Tracing was a thing now have the feature? Sure the game might not be optimized for it like a game will be that comes out when built only for the system, but that doesn't prevent it from completly working.

Everything you said is right. And if patched last gen games to tape on new graphical effects is enough to justify a piece of hardware that really may be pushing $600, then go for it. Eat, drink, and be merry. But personally I don't want to spend that type of money when the company is TELLING me up front that software specifically developed for it is a ways off. Cuz look, at the end of the day that's the whole point of a console. It's a closed system that a developer can wring every last drop out of. When you start introducing variation like this, you inevitably limit what a team can do unless the team is given infinite time and infinite money. But we all know in game development, that isn't the case. I'm no fortune teller. And we'll ultimately see how it all goes. But I think I have a good enough understanding of the games industry to kinda see where this is going. And for my money, a patched game isn't good enough. It's ok for some, don't get me wrong. I GET Halo Infinite being that way. It began as a One title, so FINE, port it over. I feel the same way about FFVII and TLOU2 on PS4/PS5. It's the commitment to future titles being the same way and acting like that's GOOD that gets me. It's a stifle on progress.

Ok this whole having to wait 2 years for a game to take advantage of the series x is bullshit. Do PC games get held back massively because they have a minimum spec? No! The games being released on xbox one wont stop devs from using ray tracing or having games that run at 30fps sub 1080 on xbox one hit 4k and 60 fps with pc ultra settings on the series x. People that use this lame excuse arent giving the situation any real thought. Xbox series x games will have higher polygon counts, better particle effects, ray traced features like lighting and reflections, faster load time, higher resolution, better draw distance and level of detail and in most cases double the framerate!
What exactly are you expecting from next generation launch titles on either system that is considered a true paradigm shift in the way games have worked since the 360/ps3 generation? By the time these new systems are becoming familiar to game devs where they can bring some game changing features it will be 1.5 or 2 years in. So please if you can tell me how the xbox one is gonna hinder the series x games from using all the above features i listed im all ears. Plus with the new xbox your gonna get next gen upgraded xbox one games for free if you already own them while sony seems to barely have backwards compatibility fleshed out for the ps5. By the way i own all current gen game consoles and i have always owned every console every gen since the ps1 era so dont start calling me a fanboy

UMMM, PC games developed first for consoles are ALWAYS held back. Because the console hardware is always so far behind what top spec PC hardware is capable of. Hence, and this will be the second time I've used this example, something like Star Citizen being impossible to run on a current console. It was built ground up to take FULL advantage of the highest end PC hardware. It doesn't have to worry about making itself work on lower end hardware the way a multiplatform title does. That's what so few people in this discussion are not understanding or are unaware of. When you're developing a game for multiple platforms at multiple performance levels, if you want your game to sell, you need to make sure it works as flawlessly as possible on the LOWEST platform, the lowest common denominator. So, If I'm developing a game that I know has to work on xbox one s, and xbox one x, AND series X, it will invariably not be able to take full advantage of the best console. The core design of the game and the gameworld has to be doable on the weakest hardware. Look to the example Cerny posed during the PS5 brief today. How current games rely on tunnels, passageways, elevator rides, etc, etc to hide different parts of the gameworld loading in. Either that or the developer just says eff it and lets you see a bunch of ugly geometry pop in. PS5 and Series X completely wipe the need to develop games that way. Developers can actually build game worlds DIFFERENTLY now. BUT, not if they also need it to be playable on an Xbox one S. A game designed across those platforms would never be able to tailor completely to both platforms. At that point it'd be two completely different games and no studio wants to pay for that. Same thing for what you’re saying about one game having higher poly models and higher detail levels. Remember that that requires paying an artist to develop not one, but now TWO different character models. It costs additional money and it costs additional TIME. Two things that development teams NEVER have enough of. Thinking that you'll have the same game where looks like what you'd expect on an xbox one but then magically look worlds better on series x is insanity. And it will happen again with PC gaming. Nvidia will launch its next batch of cards that will totally dwarf the performance of these new consoles and we'll go back to waiting for developers to catch up. It's a cycle, and it's gone this way every time. EDIT: Oh, and MS NEVER said that every BC title would magically get a next gen makeover on series x. They promised backwards compatibility. No more, no less. If a studio has the time, money, and interest, they can go in and work up a patch. But don't assume that every single game will get a boost. Most likely will not.

I've never heard so much rubbish. Explain why PC games has been accounting for over 4 generations of CPU and GPU for the last 15 years with PC games??? The recent Digital Foundry videos where they physically saw a build of Gears 5 (built in just 2 weeks) show you your comment is completely inaccurate. Gears 5 is running on Series X right now, with all of PCs ultra settings. And 2 extra settings PC version doesn't even have. And it uses 0% of RDNA 2 technology in fsct 0% of any next Gen features of the Series X. MS have built the API to scale dramatically for their game development. You only have to look at the settings on Gears 5 on a PC to see how much experience MS has with this. Sony don't have that experience as they have only just started putting some exclusives on PC. Series X ganes even if it also launches on Xbox One will look night and day better in every aspect.

If you're looking at that Gears footage and think you're seeing a night and day difference, you're delusional. It looks better and runs more smoothly in cutscenes, yes. With a slight boost in lighting quality due to the pseudo GI, yes. But it still DEFINITELY looks like a game of THIS generation. I was talking to a friend earlier about this and it's basically going to be the same transition period like what we experienced when moving from the PS2/Xbox to the Xbox360/PS3. In the beginning, there were numerous cross gen titles that featured slight upgrades here and there but ultimately looked very similar. You can only do so much in terms of scalability with the budgets put in place and the time crunches put in place on these developers. You'll have Halo Infinite "regular" on Xbox One and X, and Halo Infinite with a bit of extra polish on Series X and PC. But they'll have to ultimately be the same game.

Mate no way. It's night and day between Xbox One X and PC. Some scenes look entirely different. Especially due to SSR implementations. There's tons that had to be scaled back. Huge amounts. The proof is there on Switch as well. The Switch now has The Witcher 3, Doom among others. Games designed for massively better hardware in PS4 and Xbox One. Yet scaled back to work on the much much weaker Switch. There is tons of evidence everywhere that disproves your theory.

Switch ports prove nothing. You can decontent a game all day long to cram it into weaker hardware. You can tear up a piece of art and make it ******, but you can't take a piece of **** and make it art. Not to say that any of those games are **** or anything, but you get the phrase. Is it neat to see? Sure, but it can't be used a comparison to the differences between tailor designing a game for brand new hardware and porting over a game developed for inferior hardware. And before you go saying "well they could design it for series x and then scale it back!!" that would essentially require them to do 2 different games, which is what they would want to avoid. The Series X and PS5 hardware is so radically different than what we currently have that a game built ground up for one of those platforms likely would not work on the older hardware. Look at Star Citizen on PC as an example. It's the only game currently in existence in a playable form that has a hard SSD requirement. Because it was built for that from the ground up, it is more or less unplayable off of a mechanical drive. This is why we likely will be seeing many of these games being last gen titles at their core with as much of what the series x can do as possible dumped on top.

Do you hear yourself? Tear up a piece of art? Man you have 0 respect for the Switch. You just contradicted yourself. You've just admitted scaling works. But try at the same time to call the version poor. Hate to break it to you, the Switch version are not poor. Weaker yes but not poor. No development will be held back.

What really matters to you doesn't necessarily matter to someone else. I could care less what 1st Party title Sony releases. I'm all about that Forza and Halo. AAA 3rd party titles will play better on the Series X. I was considering getting the PS5 because of the lack of and HDMI in, but not after seeing these specs. I was under the impression they would be closer in spec. Just going to have to keep my XOX for HDMI in.

"MS made several. Points to Digital Foundry over and over that there clock speeds are fixed. They will not go lower." "The tech experts are predicting that Sony in a panic have shown 10.28 Terra flops as the high end of its clock. Which won't be sustainable all the time. Just boost to 10.28 Terra flops occasionally to help with load. But will not sustain that load." 1. Why would they not show peak performance? Microsoft did too. 2. I think you misunderstood PlayStation's approach to variable clock rates, vs Series X. PS5 will throttle down clock rates at constant full power to address thermals. Series X will have constant clock rates, but will still have to throttle down on power to address thermals. It does not have fixed performance, the units would destroy themselves if it did. The advantage of PS5s approach is that throttling down is predictable and dependant on load, and therefore allows games to be far more stable. 3. The much higher clock rates compensate for lack of CUs when it comes to rasterisation, so the Series X advantage is smaller than the ALU's tflops comparison suggests. Overall performance does not fall on the ALU alone, everyone needs to stop falling into that trap. "Also we can confirm PS5 won't use SSD as ram. It doesn't have direct access to CPU. Which means game worlds won't be as big and expansive as Hellblade 2 trailer." Just wrong. It doesn't need to give access directly to the CPU, as it has a dedicated core equivalent to 2 zen cores (more than the entire PS4) running I/O. Throughput is over twice as fast as Series X, meaning the need for virtual RAM is surpassed. How big and expansive a world is relies on the CPU itself, both consoles are running virtually identical CPUs. How detailed and varied it is depends on throughput. Series X could potentially have more variation, but at the expense of pop-in and slower asset streaming. PS5 will be seamless. In real terms, there won't be any significant differences between the two when it comes to game design.

Bro, I couldn't have said it better myself. It's almost as if ppl didn't hear a word Mark said. It's almost as if there's an agenda to downplay the PS5 as inferior. Do people really believe the architectural genius of Mark Cerny would miscalculate numbers, which in turn would make the PS5 a noticeable loser?

MS didn't show peak rates. There is no peak rates. Series X operates those clocks all the time. No variable rates. Having the variable clock to thermals is worse. Because as everypne knows not all systems operate under the same thermals exactly. Even worse with thr many causal gamers who have never vacuumed out their vents ever. A dedicated core, yes. And that core requires an operation cycle. So that's an extra operation cycle outside of the actual Zen 2 processor that also has operation ocks per cycle. 3. It's preferable to have less clocks and more CUs. Not the other way around. Any developer worth there salt has said this countless times. What is going to happen is people who think the PS5 has secret sauce is going to be disappointed.

The biggest issue for me is that the PlayStation 5 doesn't appear to have variable-rate shading. This is going to be the biggest differentiator and might push Xbox Series X to new heights. Let's hope Sony has a solution.

It also sounds like Ray Tracing on Series X is a whole different level to PS5 from what Cerny was saying about PS5. Series X can affective ly Ray Trace 13 tflops alongside the 12.155 TFLOPS for the rest. As Digital Foundry confirmed. After all MS and AMD designed RDNA 2 Ray Tracing together. All AMD GPU for PC and Series X will utilize Direct X Ray Tracing. Which is a MS product. And won't be available to PS5. It also seems like Sony scampered to boost clock the GPU from 9tfkops to 10.28. But as noted by Cerny and other Tech people, PS5 won't be able to maintain 10.28 tflops I definately. Also I am gutted that PS5 SSD cannot directly access the CPU. Something Digital Foundry said would make the environments and world in realtime from the Hellblade 2 trailer realistically possible.

Isn't quality of library subjective and also influenced by hyperbole?
Critical acclaim excepted.

Absolutely. And it all changes with the times. Last gen's PS games were liked all around. A bit overrated if you ask me. But for this next gen they basically are repeating their formula? Literally with sequels of the games, so it's the same games. They're being conservative and that doesn't always pay off. Not forever.

Yes, but with little to no exclusives, in the end PS5 sales figure "will be way more powerful than" Series X. And the funny part is, this ain't gonna be the first time that happens between Sony and MS.

Oh. I didn't know any games got announced today. What did Sony announce? MS have already announced Halo Infinite, Hellblade 2 and Project Mara. MS has 15 studios now. Expect a huge AAA game output from Xbox this Gen. Compared to just 5 studios at the start of Xbox One launch.

"Compared to just 5 studios at the start of Xbox One launch."
LOL another typical Richard Loveridge LIE.

Here's the problem with the Sony exclusives and today's announcement. Cerny stated that they were going to make the top 100 games (by time played) backwards compatible. That means about 6 Maddens, the same number of NBA 2K games, Fortnight (and probably Apex), and a bunch of RPGs (Witcher 3, Nino Kuni, Persona 5, FF14, etc). None of their admittedly awesome single player games would probably be on that list (God of War, Uncharted anything, TLOU don't take 100s of hours to beat), so unless they make a special case for their own games, we're gonna miss out.

You really believe that when he said 100 titles he was talking about the past 10 years of Fifa and Madden? Why would that even make sense?

I'm not worried about storage speeds... Let's be honest, currently the sata3 speeds now aren't fully utilized on mechanical drives anyway so real world performance of an NVMe competitively will be night and day for the new consoles, regardless of who's faster.

"The SSD on the PS5 is considerably faster than the one found in the Xbox Series X." The PS5 also has a user-upgradeable SSD, whereas the Xbox is using proprietary crap for the the expandable storage. To me, that's something that matters more than the amount of teraflops available. So, in terms of hardware, Series X has the better graphics, the PS5 has the better storage solution. Let's see how exactly that reflects on the pricing of each console.

I'll explain for you. The SSD in Series X has direct access to CPU. The CPU can call directly from the SSD with no need for that info to go through the ram. As Digital Foundry pointed out the environment in Hellblade 2 realtime trailer is possible during gameplay because of this. This is why the external SSD card on Xbox Series X is Proprietary. It also has direct access to CPU. So games can be played form there also. As the CPU has direct access to the external drive the same as the internal SSD. Both had to be exactly the same for this reason. Which will result in bigger and more detailed game worlds. Larger environmental detail for much further into the distance. The SSD in Series X isn't just for storage like it is in PS5. It's part of the power difference also. Or system capabilities. Series X is far more balanced as a system as a result. And PS5 has alot of bottlenecks going by what Sony revealed today. This is why games can't be played form a USB 3.2 SSD on Series X. It doesn't have direct access to CPU that way. It means all games on Xbox Series X can utilize SSD virtual Memory. Whereas this is not possible on PS5. PS5 SSD is nothing more than storage.

Yes, but they said use at your own risk essentially, because only "certified" ones work.

The inclusion of a standard User-accessable NVMe slot is guaranteed to cause them tech-support NIGHTMARES with all the highly-variable NVMe SSDs out there (not to mention all the people who will purchase a standard M.2 (not NMVe) drive and try to install it (as it WILL fit in the slot.) Plus, what about all the cheap'o only NVMe x2 drives out there? Horrible decision on their part. It WILL come back to bit them in the ass.
This is why MS went with a fully-custom solution they can control 100%. No surprises.

I am usually against proprietary stuff but in this case I think I prefer the proprietary $150 to $200 (probable cost) solution by Microsoft than the most likely $400+ user upgrade-able Sony solution.

Oh dear, and just Monday some of the fanboys were promising 13 tflops for the PS5 according to "leaks."

That didn't make any sense given the math. AMD leaked both chips months ago during testing.

I'm expecting smoother gameplay, larger more filled worlds and higher visual fidelity on Series X exclusives over Sonys next Gen. There is just way to many things PS5 hasn't got or is throttled with. GPU performance aside, Series X has many new features completely absent from PS5. Especially direct access from SSD to PS5.

It's a darn pity that MS didn't go for a 1.5TF SSD. Would have been a nice scoop to have doubled the Sony offering. Half hope that MS go crazy loss-leader and launch below Sony's price.

I think they want to save on cost. I'm sure we'll get an upgraded model down the line.

Well, I'm buying both systems.

I'm definately gonna wait for 3 or 4 years for the PS5 Pro. The standard PS5 has way to may bottlenecks. I can't justify paying for it. I'll get the Pro version in 2024 or something.

Do the math on the SSD speeds. You go from 4 seconds to completely dump the ram to disk and fill it back up again to 2 seconds. And you're rarely going to do that. If it takes 7 seconds or 3.5 seconds at start up and then you never notice loading times because the SSD is fast enough to keep up no one will notice that. It's a really weird place to go with an expensive solution. The gpu makes more sense. That thing is clocked insanely high. There will be less of a power differential than the raw tflops suggests, though it will likely still be slower. Cerny not bringing up variable rate shading is weird though, and if that's not in the PS5 the XSX is going to have huge advantages in titles that use it.

"way more powerful" - weird flex but ok.

It’s 1.875 more, but the PlayStation 5 doesn’t always run at maximum clock speed according to Mark Cerny. So the real-world difference is higher. Plus, it doesn’t seem like there’s VRS on Sony’s machine. Combine all that, then yes, it’s way more.

And SSD direct access to CPU. Virtual Ram. That's a big deal PS5 isn't designed with at all.

PS5 SSD throughput is twice that of the Series X. I'm not sure how one would think the Series X would be able to offload more data faster. Throughput is throughput.

What really makes me wonder how much different the graphics will be is the fact that all the overhead for the announced virtual surround sound is done on a separate chip so none of the audio is needing the ps5's cpu. I wonder how much of a difference that will make. Also because of the faster SSD I wonder if the loading times will enable better graphics due to being able to show higher quality graphics via dynamically loading the environment as you move around. Compressed graphics load almost 2x as fast as on the Series X. The 448 gb/s of the memory bandwidth is higher than the series X's 6gb @ 336 gb/s but that may not matter. Overall I feel that the series X will look better than the PS5 but the PS5 will probably have far better sound, loading times for large textures, and an overall smoother experience due to the memory pipelines being faster. Also, the Series X is going to be pulled down by the fact all games will also be on the PC and forced to deal with suboptimal configurations as a result, while the PS5 will not be brought down by the PC and thus system specific optimizations will probably be used in the future.

It's not the ties to PC that will cause issues for Series X. It's the ties to Xbox One that will cause issues. While Sony's internal teams (Most, at least) are already in full on PS5 only development mode, Arguably Series X's biggest launch title (Halo Infinite) will be a cross gen affair that will only take advantage of some of the innovations present in the new hardware. And since MS has said their exclusive titles will all be cross platform for a while it'll be that way for a number of exclusives. Great news for people that don't plan on picking up a Series X on day 1, bad news for early adopters getting this very powerful, probably very expensive hardware only to have half step software to run on it.

Series X also have dedicated chip, SSD can improve load time, but you wrong on the that improving graphics and visuals, those are done by the GPU prowess in this case Series X has almost 1.875 TF and 16 GPU CU advantages and the 3.8GHz vs 3.5GHz for Sony advantage as well. It is amazing and unfortunately unbelievable that suddenly the SSD in any computing environment suddenly becomes the all spec that determines a Game PC Rig and or a Console per top performance. If these roles were reversed, every singly gamer would have called MSFT out with some unsavory names.
I bet if Sony had used Pentium CPU and Intel's GPU with this said SSD, y'all would have still said the same thing about the absolute genius of Sony. Suddenly, facts don't matter anymore.

Specs don't equal real world performance. I don't care about specs. How well will games run on my Xbox? How gracefully will it switch between my apps/games? How fast? Boot times? Load times? Multitasking? Will MS make UI adjustments to take full advantage of the power?

Fair take, but don't tell me Specs to matter in this Sony, MSFT console head to head. It has always matter and will continue to matter.
All what you listed are function of the specs' performances. Gracefully switch between your apps/games, how fast, boot times, Load times, multitasking, game resume mode etc. almost all this have been demonstrated. I can tell you from what MSFT have openly shared, they plan to fully take advantage of this console power

Eh, they do actually. We're not talking about a Wish app-based purchase for components. Specs 110% matter here. We're talking about a multi-million unit order of devices tested and optimized to the ends of the Earth. Your comment would make sense in a situation where you're speaking about a multitude of different video cards under the same core name, like a Radeon XT 5700 developed by XFX, Powercolor, EVGA, etc. because that's just what happens when you have different coolers, memory allotments, clock speeds, and things of that nature. With consoles that isn't the case. The specs make things much more predictable. The only real variable then becomes the games that are made and how well they take advantage of the hardware.

Sad day to be a Sony fanboy. Let's hope they make up for it with games.

I mean unless you like spiderman, gow or cinematic movie based simulator games then sure.