Microsoft worried on Why PS5 Outperforms Xbox Series X on Certain Games

Gaming By Mark Grantt November 28, 2020

There is no doubt that Microsoft believes that the Xbox Series X is a more powerful console than the PS5. Microsoft started this gaming generation touting that the Xbox Series X is the “world’s most powerful console”. This statement is becoming less true with the increase of new Next-Gen titles as the PS5 is outperforming it in early game tests, and Microsoft is working on why.

Digital Foundry, the youtube channel has been analyzing and comparing some of the new games across both the PS5. On the spec sheets, the PS5 is capable of 10.28 teraflops of GPU performance while the Xbox Series X is capable of 12 teraflops, but results of those comparisons are kind surprising, especially for certain games and it doesn’t appear as one-sided as the hardware specifications.

In Devil May Cry 5 and Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War, the Xbox Series X has better performance in 4K and ray tracing modes, but the higher frame rate option runs better on PS5, with the frame rate gaps being more than 40fps in some cases.

“The dips look really strange to me, and it kind of suggests to me some kind of API limitation on the Xbox side where the GPU is being held back by something,” suggests Digital Foundry editor Richard Leadbetter.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the game has been massively promoted by Microsoft as being one of the launch titles, it turns out that it runs a bit smoother on PS5, with the Xbox Series X version showing screen tearing and regular frame rate drops below 60fps. This is a big deal for Xbox users, as Valhalla is one of the few games that released with the console and it doesn’t run as well as people would expect it

The same story plays out in Dirt 5, where image quality and resolution go in PS5’s favour. Dirt’s developer Codemasters has acknowledged this performance gap and has already confirmed that a fix is about to come in the next weeks/months.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War does run better in ray tracing performance mode on Xbox Series X, but PS5 performs better in 120fps mode, we can see the pattern here.

These are not single performance problems for a single game or a unique situation, these issues are occurring in multiple games, and according to certain developers, they said that some of the issues arise from the fact that Microsoft only allowed developers to submit games for Xbox Series X certification in June, whereas developers had access to PS5 dev kits much earlier than that.

With that information by the developers, we can assume that those issues are not necessarily a platform issue, but an issue with developers not having enough time to optimize their titles for the Xbox Series X/S.

Microsoft is aware and has acknowledged these issue and promises that they are working with developers to fix and prevent them from happening with future games.

Youtube Videos by Digital Foundry.